---
title: "Skills"
url: "https://control.actana.ai/docs/cli/skills"
description: "The two skills actana writes into your Harnesses' skill directories, and the per-file opt-out."
updated: 2026-09-01T09:03:18+00:00
---

`actana` ships two skills of its own and writes both into the global skills directory of every Harness already on this machine. Claude Code gets `~/.claude/skills/`. Codex, Cursor CLI, and OpenCode get `~/.agents/skills/`. The Panel never writes into those directories. Only this CLI does, and only these two folders.

A Harness you do not use here costs you no directory: copies land only where the Harness itself already created a home.

## The two skills

- **`actana-sessions/`** teaches a coding CLI how to drive Cores and sessions with these verbs, and how to collect what a session it started produced. It is **invoke-only**: it sits installed and waits to be asked.
- **`actana-subagent/`** is the other half of the same round. It teaches a session that was woken *as somebody else's sub-agent* how to hand work back — a report file, ending in a marker line, at the path its prompt named — and forbids it starting sessions of its own. It is **eager**: it triggers on a prompt that already declared the session a sub-agent.

The two are deliberately asymmetric. A skill is a **folder**, not a single file. `actana-sessions/` is `SKILL.md` beside `await.sh` (a watcher that waits on several sessions' report files). `actana-subagent/` is `SKILL.md` alone. Run the watcher with `bash await.sh` — it is installed without an executable bit, so installing a skill stays a filesystem write.

## Writing and repairing

```bash
actana harness skills
actana harness skills --json
```

The same write also runs quietly in front of every other `actana` command, because this package has no npm install hook. The skills are there one command after `npm i -g @actana/cli`. `harness skills` is the verb that reports what happened.

A copy is replaced when it differs from the shipped one, edits included. To keep your own version, delete the `x-actana-managed: true` line — from `SKILL.md` frontmatter, or from the comment on the second line of `await.sh`. That file is then yours and is never written again. The hatch is **per file**: keeping your `await.sh` does not stop `actana-sessions/SKILL.md` from updating. `harness skills` reports the folder as `skipped` and names the file.

## See also

- [The actana CLI](/docs/cli)
- [Client nouns](/docs/cli/commands)
- [Harnesses](/docs/core/harnesses)
- [Sessions](/docs/panel/sessions)