Skills

Skills are the primary way OAK extends your AI agent’s capabilities. They are deployed into each agent’s skills directory during oak init and can be invoked directly from your agent’s interface using slash commands (e.g., /project-governance), or they activate automatically when your request matches their description.

You don’t need to memorize commands — just describe what you need:

"We need coding standards for this Python project"     → /project-governance
"What did we discuss about auth last week?"             → /codebase-intelligence
"I'm about to refactor the payment module — what breaks?" → /codebase-intelligence
"Propose an RFC for switching to PostgreSQL"            → /project-governance

Skills use CI’s semantic search and memory under the hood — no additional API keys required beyond what your agent already uses.

Codebase Intelligence

`/codebase-intelligence`

Search, analyze, and query your codebase using semantic vector search, impact analysis, and direct SQL queries against the Oak CI database. Finds conceptually related code that grep would miss, assesses refactoring risk, and provides direct database access for session history, activity logs, and agent run data.

When to use:

Finding similar implementations across the codebase
Understanding how components connect to each other
Assessing the impact of code changes before refactoring
Recalling what was discussed or decided in previous sessions
Looking up past conversations, outcomes, or decisions
Querying session history or activity logs
Looking up past memories or observations
Checking agent run costs and performance

Examples:

# Find code by concept, not just text
/codebase-intelligence how does the authentication middleware work?

# Assess risk before refactoring
/codebase-intelligence I'm about to change the session model schema — what might be affected?

# Recall past conversations and decisions
/codebase-intelligence what did we discuss about the auth refactor last week?

# Look up what happened in previous sessions
/codebase-intelligence show me recent sessions and what was accomplished

# Search past learnings and gotchas
/codebase-intelligence are there any known gotchas with the payment module?

# Query raw data when you need specifics
/codebase-intelligence how many sessions have we had this week and what was the total cost?

Reference docs included: semantic search guide, impact analysis workflow, database querying guide, full schema reference (auto-generated), advanced query cookbook, analysis playbooks.

Rules Management

`/project-governance`

Create and maintain project constitutions, agent instruction files (CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, .cursorrules), and RFC/ADR documents. A constitution (oak/constitution.md) codifies your team’s engineering standards, architecture patterns, and conventions so that AI agents follow them consistently.

When to use:

Creating a new constitution for a project
Adding or updating coding standards
Syncing agent instruction files after constitution changes
Creating CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, or .cursorrules for a new project
Proposing a new feature via RFC
Reviewing an RFC for completeness and technical soundness

What a constitution defines:

Hard rules — invariants that must never be violated
Golden paths — standard ways to implement common changes
Anchor files — canonical reference implementations to copy from
Quality gates — what must pass before work is complete

Examples:

# Establish standards for a new project
/project-governance We need to establish our constitution for this Python project

# Add a specific rule
/project-governance Add a new rule No-Magic-Literals (Zero Tolerance)

# Keep agent instruction files in sync
/project-governance Sync all agent files after we updated the constitution

# Propose a change formally
/project-governance Create an RFC for adding a caching layer to the API

# Review an RFC
/project-governance Review oak/rfc/RFC-001-add-caching-layer.md

After creating or updating a constitution, sync it to all agent instruction files:

oak rules sync-agents

Reference docs included: constitution creation guide, good/bad constitution examples, agent file guide, good/bad agent file examples, RFC creation workflow, RFC review checklist.

Refreshing Skills

After upgrading OAK, refresh skills to get the latest content:

oak skill refresh

This re-copies all skill files from the package into each agent’s skills directory without changing your configuration.