# Import a Skill from GitHub or a URL

Paste a link to a GitHub repository or a URL that hosts an Anthropic-style Skill package, and your employee will import the whole thing directly instead of you rebuilding it by hand in the Create Skill drawer. This is on our roadmap and is not active yet: the option appears in the Skills toolbar and in the Create Skill drawer today, but importing does not run until we ship it.

Skills are the step-by-step playbooks an employee follows when a task matches, and today you build every one of them inside Sistava: type a name, write a "when to use" trigger, paste the instructions, pick a category. That works well for a skill you are writing yourself, but a lot of useful skill packages already exist as plain folders of Markdown and reference files sitting in public GitHub repositories, written for Claude's own Skills format or shared informally by other teams. Right now there is no way to point Sistava at one of those repos and have it become a skill on your employee.

Import a Skill from GitHub or a URL is the fix we are building for that gap. The plan is simple: you give an employee a repository link or a direct URL, Sistava fetches the package, reads its structure (name, description, instructions, and any bundled reference files), and turns it into a normal skill on that employee, ready to toggle on or off exactly like a skill you wrote from scratch or added from the catalog.

The difference from what already exists matters. Browse Skills gives you a curated catalog we maintain inside Sistava; Create Skill gives you a blank editor for writing your own. Neither lets you reach outside the platform and pull in a skill package someone else published on GitHub, or a Skill bundle they linked from a blog post or a shared drive. Import from Repo is meant to close that specific gap: it targets external, already-written packages, not skills that live inside Sistava's own catalog, so you stop retyping instructions that already exist somewhere else in a well-formed file.

Nothing about this changes how skills run once they are on an employee. An imported skill would load on demand the same way every other skill does: the employee sees its name and description at all times, and only reads the full instructions when the current task actually matches. Import only changes how the skill instructions get onto the employee in the first place; the loading, toggling, editing, and removal behavior stays identical to any skill you create by hand today.

The reason this is a real piece of work rather than a fetch is that outside packages arrive with baggage. A package written for a different platform tends to link to files it did not bring with it, tell the reader to run scripts, name tools your employee does not have, and carry the branding of wherever it came from. Handed straight to an employee, instructions like that make it worse at the job, not better, so the import has to clean them up rather than trust them.

Length is the other half of the same problem. A skill earns its place when it reads like a short playbook: what it is, when to use it, and how to approach it. The good ones run a page or two, not a whole repository poured into a text box.

## What This Adds On Top Of Create Skill And Browse Skills

Create Skill is for writing a playbook from scratch, one field at a time. Browse Skills is for picking from the catalog Sistava already curates and maintains inside the platform. Import from Repo is meant to be the third path: pulling in a package someone already wrote and published outside Sistava, whether that is a public GitHub repository built for Claude's own Skills format, or a URL hosting a shareable skill bundle.

The value is not having a third way to create a skill for its own sake, it is not having to manually retype instructions, when-to-use logic, and reference material that already exists in a well-formed external file. A team publishes a skill package for a workflow you already need, you would import it instead of reading it and rebuilding it by hand.

## What Stays The Same After Import

An imported skill is not a special or restricted type of skill. Once it lands on an employee, it behaves exactly like a skill you wrote in Create Skill or added from Browse Skills: it appears in its category with the rest, it can be toggled on or off, its instructions and "when to use" field remain editable, and it can be duplicated or removed the same way.

It also loads the same way at run time. The employee always knows the skill's name and short description, but only reads its full instructions when the current task actually matches that skill, the same on-demand behavior every other skill on the platform already follows.

## How It Works

**Point at a repo or URL, get back a ready-to-use skill**

The intended flow starts from the Skills tab toolbar or the Create Skill drawer, where an "Import from GitHub or URL" option is already visible even though it is inactive. You would paste a repository link (or a direct URL to a package) and submit it.

Sistava would then fetch the package, parse its skill definition and any linked reference files, and present it to you before anything is added, so you can confirm the name, the "when to use" trigger, and the instructions look right for your employee. Once confirmed, it becomes a normal skill: same toggle, same edit flow, same catalog behavior, same on-demand loading as every skill already on the platform.

Until this ships, use Create Skill to write the instructions yourself, or Browse Skills to pull from the catalog we already maintain. Both are fully active today and cover the same end result, just without the copy-paste step from an external source.

## Use Cases

### Adopt a workflow somebody has already written up

A team publishes a well-written playbook for a job you also do, such as screening inbound leads or preparing a weekly report. Once this ships, you would point an employee at the link instead of reading the package and rebuilding it field by field.

### Bring across a runbook that already lives in your own repository

If your own internal procedures are already written as files in a repository, importing keeps that file the original and the employee's skill the copy, rather than starting a second version in the Create Skill drawer that immediately begins to drift.

### Try a published package without committing to retyping it

The cost of trying somebody else's approach today is the transcription. Removing that step makes it reasonable to import a package, watch how an employee uses it on real work, and turn it off again if it does not suit how you operate.

### Keep using Create Skill and Browse Skills in the meantime

Nothing is blocked while this is being built. Write the instructions yourself in Create Skill, or add one from the catalog Sistava maintains, and you get a fully working skill today with the same on-demand loading an imported one will have.

## Comparison

| Before | After |
|---|---|
| A useful playbook already exists in a public repository, and the only way to get it onto an employee is to open it and retype the instructions into the Create Skill form. | You will paste the link and let Sistava read the package into a skill for you. |
| Copying by hand means transcribing the name, the trigger, the instructions, and the reference material, and something always gets dropped on the way. | The whole package will come across together, and you confirm it before it is added to an employee. |
| An external package carries steps and file references that mean nothing here, so pasting it in as written can leave an employee worse off. | A review step will put the parsed skill in front of you first, so nothing reaches an employee unseen. |
| Adopting somebody else's published workflow is a small project, so most of the time you do not bother. | It will be a link and a confirmation, short enough that trying one is worth it. |

## FAQ

### Can I import a skill from GitHub today?

Not yet. The option is visible in the Skills tab toolbar and in the Create Skill drawer, but importing is not active. Selecting it currently tells you the feature is on the way rather than pulling in a package.

### What should I use instead until this ships?

Use Create Skill to write the instructions yourself, or Browse Skills to add from the catalog Sistava already maintains. Both are live today and produce a normal, fully functional skill on your employee.

### Once it ships, will an imported skill work differently from one I write myself?

No. The plan keeps imported skills identical to hand-written ones once they land on an employee: same on-demand loading, same toggle, same editing, same categorization, and same removal behavior. Import only changes how the instructions first arrive on the employee, not how they run afterward.

### Will this only work with GitHub repositories?

The feature is scoped to a GitHub repository link or a direct URL hosting a skill package, formatted for Claude's own Skills structure or an equivalent shareable bundle. It is not a general-purpose web scraper for arbitrary pages.

### When will I be able to import a skill from a link?

No date has been announced. The option is already visible in the Skills toolbar and the Create Skill drawer so you can see where it will live, and it starts working when we ship it. Until then, Create Skill and Browse Skills produce the same finished result.

### Will I get to review an imported skill before it lands on my employee?

That is the plan. The intended flow reads the package, then shows you the name, the when-to-use trigger, and the instructions before anything is added, so you confirm what your employee is about to follow rather than finding out afterwards.

### Could a skill written for another platform confuse my employee?

It can, which is exactly why import is a review step and not a paste. Packages written elsewhere often point at files they did not bring with them, tell the reader to run scripts, or name tools your employee does not have, and those instructions have to be cleaned up rather than followed literally.

### Does a longer skill make an employee better at the job?

No. A skill works best when it reads like a short, sharp playbook of a page or two: what it is, when to use it, and how to approach it. A long repository dump gives an employee more to wade through and less clarity about what to do.

## Where Import a Skill from GitHub or a URL fits

Import a Skill from GitHub or a URL is part of Things they can do out of the box.

Every AI employee ships with built-in abilities that work out of the box. Search the live web for real-time information, scrape and crawl any website for structured data, and generate images directly in conversation. No plugins to install, no APIs to configure.

- [Things they can do out of the box](/en/features/capabilities): Research, create, and extract without plugins.

## Read the guide

- [Guide: Import a Skill from GitHub or a URL](/en/guide/equip/skills)

## More in Capabilities

- [Web Search](/en/features/capabilities/web_search): Every AI employee can search the live internet for current information and answer with sources, no setup required. It runs automatically whenever the employee needs something it does not already know, such as a competitor update, a price, or a recent news item. Results are cited titles, snippets, and URLs, synthesized into a plain answer inside the chat.
- [Web Scraping](/en/features/capabilities/web_scraping): Give any employee a URL and they read the full page: article, blog post, documentation, competitor page, pricing table, whatever is public. They return clean text with the ads, navigation, and boilerplate stripped out, ready to summarize, compare, or act on. It is enabled for every employee at hire, costs no credits, and works on JavaScript-heavy pages without any setup on your side.
- [Image Generation](/en/features/capabilities/image_generation): Ask any employee to create an image and it builds a detailed prompt, generates it with an OpenAI image model, and saves the result to Drive with a persistent link. Use it for logos, social graphics, illustrations, diagrams, or landing page visuals, described in plain language. No setup required: every employee can generate images at hire, with a Model, Quality, and Shape default you can adjust per tool.
- [Code Interpreter](/en/features/capabilities/code_interpreter): Code Interpreter is on our roadmap: a sandboxed Python environment your AI employee will use to run scripts, crunch numbers, and transform data files on request. Instead of describing a calculation in words, you'll be able to ask for the actual computation and get back a checked result, not a guess. It is not available yet.
- [Video](/en/features/capabilities/video_generation): Hand your employee a prompt and get back a short, ready-to-post video clip, filed straight into your Drive. Built for social cuts, ad concepts, and quick product demos. Editing your own footage is coming next.
- [B2B Marketplace](/en/features/capabilities/b2b_marketplace): A network of real, vetted businesses living inside Sistava. Ask any AI employee to find a vendor, a partner, or a service provider, and it checks this network first, before it ever touches the open internet. Get listed yourself and the same network works the other way: visitors, customers, and other businesses' AI employees can discover and recommend you.
- [Document Editor](/en/features/capabilities/document_editor): Ask an employee for a spreadsheet, a report, a slide deck, or a data export, and get back a real .xlsx, .docx, .pptx, .csv, or .pdf file, not a wall of text pasted into chat. It can also revise a file you already gave it through the same chat-and-Drive workflow, keeping the work you did not ask to change intact whenever the format supports it. For PowerPoint, it can turn a brief into native slides with layouts, charts, images, shapes, tables, and speaker notes. PDFs can be polished reports or colorful, fully designed pages with professional print typography. Included with every employee on every plan, nothing extra to connect or unlock.
- [Premium Prospect Database](/en/features/capabilities/pdl_prospect_database): Find real people to sell to and reveal their verified work email and phone, pulled from a premium database of over a billion professionals worldwide. Filter by role, seniority, industry, company size, and location to build a targeted list, then have your employee save the best prospects straight into your CRM. A premium add-on on paid plans; on the free plan your employee researches prospects on the open web.
- [Send an Employee to Your Meeting](/en/features/capabilities/meeting_attender): Share a Google Meet, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams link and your employee joins the call as a named participant. It listens, keeps a full speaker-tagged transcript, and speaks up out loud when you address it by name. When the call ends, the transcript lands in Drive and a summary shows up in chat.
- [Get a Live Meeting Transcript](/en/features/capabilities/meeting_live_transcript): Your AI employee joins a Google Meet, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams call and captures a full transcript as people speak, tagged by speaker and timestamped. Ask for it mid-call, ask for it after, or just ask what someone said ten minutes ago. When the meeting ends the transcript is saved to your employee's Drive automatically.
- [Meeting Summary](/en/features/capabilities/meeting_summary): When a meeting your employee attended ends, it writes a summary and drops it in chat automatically: what got decided, who owns what, and the action items. No need to ask for a recap, it is already waiting when you check in.
- [Document Text Extraction](/en/features/capabilities/text_extraction): When you attach a document to a chat message or upload it for training, your employee turns it into readable text on its own. PDFs, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, OpenDocument files, RTF, and plain text or data files all come through automatically, tables included, with no conversion step for you to run first.

## Explore

- [Every feature](/en/features)
- [Hire an AI employee](/en/market)
- [Pricing](/en/pricing)