What are Agent Skills?
Agent Skills are packaged, reusable instructions that teach an AI coding agent how to handle a specific Newton task — for example, “evaluate the assembly steps shown in this video,” “embed these vibration windows and flag the anomalies,” or “scaffold a branded dashboard for the demo front-end.” Each skill is a folder containing aSKILL.md (plus optional runnable reference scripts and tests) that the agent loads on demand.
Skills give agents the institutional knowledge you’d otherwise have to repeat in every prompt: which endpoint to call, what the request body looks like, and the empirical gotchas we’ve already verified against production. They’re the difference between “explain the Direct Query API” (you do the synthesis) and “run this clip through Newton and tell me if the assembly passed” (the agent already knows how).
The canonical source is the archetypeai/agent-skills repository.
Install
Any coding agent (recommended)
The skills are published on skills.sh. One command detects your coding agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Copilot, and 20+ others) and installs to the right location:Manual install (Claude Code)
Alternatively, copy the skills folder into Claude Code’s skills directory:SKILL.md format is portable: the same files work with any agent runtime that loads skills from a directory — see each agent’s docs for the directory it reads from.
Invoke
Once installed, invoke any skill in your agent with a slash command:Available skills
Three groups: Agents run a maintained pipeline server-side over the Agents API, Models call Newton directly on/query and leave the orchestration to you, and
Design covers the demo front-end.
Every skill that ships reference scripts builds them on the official python client (pip install archetypeai),
declared in each skill’s references/requirements.txt. The two exceptions call no API:
atai-newton-omega-model-data-prep is local data processing, and atai-design-system
scaffolds through the ds CLI.
Agents
Managed end-to-end pipelines — upload an input, run a pre-packaged bundle or canonical blueprint, poll, download the output. Nothing to fit, no model to host. The three sensor agents answer different questions, and the discriminator is what you already have labelled: every regime (OSM), a handful of examples of one named fault (RED), or nothing but normal operation (AD).Models
Direct Query API — one statelessPOST /query per request. Use these when you want
control over the pipeline, or the raw vectors to build on.
Design
Example projects
These public repos demonstrate the patterns covered by the skills above — clone them as starting templates: Vision & text reasoning (atai-newton-fusion-model):
- traffic-demo — live Caltrans CCTV traffic analysis; samples a burst of frames per interval and sends them as one multi-frame
/queryclip to reason over flow, incidents, and conditions. - wildfire-demo — wildfire detection across 1,200+ ALERTCalifornia cameras with Newton vision (per-camera smoke/fire/haze + zone Q&A).
- earthquake-demo — real-time USGS feed → text reasoning over structured seismic data (aftershock sequences, clustering, regional-risk ranking).
- grid-demo — California power grid (CAISO supply/demand) → text reasoning on duck-curve dynamics, ramp, renewable share, and grid-stress risk.
- wifi-demo — “is anyone home?” occupancy inference from residential WiFi device-telemetry (GHOST-IoT) — per-window verdict + per-device classification shown against ground truth.
atai-newton-omega-model, with atai-newton-omega-model-data-prep for the reference set):
- swat-demo-direct-query — 6-stage water-treatment-plant anomaly dashboard: per-channel Omega embeddings + client-side KNN, with PCA-2/UMAP-2 embedding views and per-stage accuracy badges (plus
/querytext reasoning for operator suggestions). - wind-turbine-demo — Penmanshiel wind-farm SCADA: Omega embeddings + local KNN against a leakage-free n-shot library precomputed offline, detecting a real frequency-converter fault against a healthy peer turbine.
- drilling-demo — drilling state classification from 14 North Sea (Volve) wells: Omega embeddings + local KNN against a leakage-free n-shot library built from held-out reference wells, with live accuracy vs ACTC ground truth.