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AI Agent Skills and External Tools

In the Agents section you build AI Agents that run tasks and can be configured with their own instructions and tools. Two settings let you extend what such an agent can do without changing its core instructions: Skills and external MCP servers.

Skills​

Skills are reusable instruction packets that an agent loads only when a task actually needs them. Instead of putting every rule into the main instructions, you keep detailed guidance in a skill and let the agent pull it in on demand.

Each skill has three parts:

  • Name (identifier): a short, unique name the agent uses to reference the skill.
  • Description (when to use): a brief note that tells the agent in which situations the skill is relevant.
  • Instructions (full skill text): the complete guidance the agent should follow once the skill applies.

The name and description are always visible to the agent, while the full instructions are loaded only when the agent decides the skill is needed. This keeps the agent's working context short and focused, and lets you maintain detailed, reusable procedures separately from the main prompt.

You can add several skills to one agent and remove them again at any time.

External MCP Servers​

You can connect an AI Agent to an external Model Context Protocol (MCP) server so it can use tools that the server provides. This is the counterpart to using a LoyJoy agent as an MCP server: here the agent acts as the client and consumes tools from an external system.

To connect a server:

  1. Enter the URL of the MCP server and, if required, an API key for authentication.
  2. Load the tool list. The agent connects to the server and shows the tools it discovered, along with a connection status.
  3. Select which of the discovered tools the agent is allowed to use. You can search the list, select or deselect all, invert the selection, or show only the selected tools. If you select nothing, all discovered tools are allowed.

You can connect more than one MCP server to the same agent. Tools that you selected but that the server no longer reports are marked separately, so you can spot when an external server has changed.