Skills

A skill teaches Jenny how to do something in chat — reminders, self-diagnostics, building an app for you — without any screen of its own.

Skills vs. mini-apps

If a capability needs its own screen, it’s a mini-app. If it only ever lives inside the conversation, it’s a skill. Setting a reminder, learning a new procedure, or building a new Jenny App are all skill-driven; none of them need a UI beyond chat.

How skills are loaded

Each skill is a folder at workspace/skills/<name>/SKILL.md — a markdown file with a frontmatter header plus instructions. Jenny loads skills progressively: only a short summary (name, description, path) sits in the model’s context at all times, and Jenny reads the full SKILL.md on demand when a task calls for it. This keeps the context small while still giving Jenny access to dozens of skills.

To see what’s currently enabled, type /skill in chat. It lists every enabled skill with its description — this is the fastest way to check whether a given capability is actually turned on.

Managing skills from the Apps grid

Skills show up as cards in the Skill section of the Apps tab, alongside Jenny Apps and your phone’s Android apps. Each card shows a status badge: active, idle, or disabled.

Long-press a skill card to:

Edit — open its content for editing.
Enable / Disable — toggling a skill off writes disabled: true into its frontmatter; Jenny stops seeing that skill in her context until you re-enable it.
Delete — confirms with Delete skill "{name}"? before removing it.

To create a new one, tap New Skill. It opens the chat with the prompt Hi, I want to create a new skill. Can you help me?, and Jenny walks you through the same kind of guided conversation used for apps, using the built-in skill-creator skill.

Three visibility tiers

Not every skill is meant to be poked at by hand. A skill’s frontmatter puts it in one of three tiers:

Tier	What you see	Examples
Normal	Full card, fully manageable (edit/enable/disable/delete)	Skills you or Jenny create yourself
Locked	Visible in the grid, but tapping it shows only a short descriptive card instead of an editor — no edit/disable/delete outside Developer mode	`cron`, `app-creator`, `skill-creator`, `llm-wiki`
Internal	Hidden from the grid entirely unless Developer mode is on	`memory`, `my`, `http-client`, `data-processing`, `long-goal`

Locked skills are core parts of how Jenny works (scheduling, building apps and skills, the wiki); internal skills are plumbing you’re unlikely to ever need to touch directly (self-awareness bookkeeping, low-level HTTP/data helpers). Turning on Developer mode in Settings → System reveals both the internal skills and the management actions on locked ones. Its hint text is explicit about the intent: “Also shows what Jenny uses to work: system skills and internal files (memory, configuration) appear in the lists. Only useful for looking under the hood.”

Honesty note: builtin skills don’t survive a restart

This is worth stating plainly rather than discovering the hard way: the skills that ship with Jenny (all the locked and internal ones, plus any others bundled with the app) are re-extracted from the APK every time the app starts, overwriting whatever is in their folder. If you disable a builtin skill, or edit its SKILL.md — even in Developer mode — that change is silently undone the next time Jenny restarts. The toggle in the UI doesn’t warn you about this.

Persistence only works for skills you (or Jenny, on your behalf) create yourself — those live in the same workspace/skills/ folder but are never touched by the startup extraction, so edits, disables, and deletions on them stick.

In short: treat disabling or editing a builtin skill as a “for this session” change, not a permanent setting. If you genuinely don’t want a builtin capability available, the durable option is to ask Jenny not to use it, rather than relying on the disable toggle surviving a restart.