# Skills and Templates

Understand the difference between Templates and Skills, and how to use them to build better AVCodex agents for AV teams.

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## What are Templates?

Templates are **full agent blueprints**. Pre-built configurations that include a system prompt, model selection, suggested messages, and sometimes required integrations. When you use a Template, it creates a new agent in your AVCodex workspace with everything already wired up.

**Templates are useful for:**

- Getting started quickly with a proven AV use case (a service desk agent, a programmer help bot, a pre-sales RFP assistant).
- Learning best practices for specific agent types.
- Launching a working agent in minutes instead of hours.

## What are Skills?

Skills are **composable prompt chunks**. Small pieces of a system prompt that introduce specific behaviors into your agent. Unlike Templates, Skills do not create new agents. You add them to an existing agent to layer in new capabilities.

Think of Skills like plugins. Each one teaches your agent a new behavior.

**Examples of Skills:**

- **Chain of Thought**: makes the agent reason step by step (useful for design engineering or troubleshooting paths).
- **Socratic Tutor**: guides users to answers through questions (good for onboarding new programmers).
- **Anti-Hallucination**: keeps the agent from making things up (a hard requirement for warranty and code-compliance answers).
- **Ultra-Concise**: keeps responses short and direct (great for a field tech in a rack closet on a phone).

### How Skills work

Skills are stored separately from your system prompt and composed at runtime. That means:

1. **You can add and remove Skills** without editing your system prompt.
2. **Skills stack.** Add as many as you want. They all apply.
3. **Skills are visible** in the system prompt editor under the "Skills" section.
4. **The agent sees the Skill instructions** alongside your system prompt during every conversation.

### Personalities

Personalities are a special category of Skills that define *how* your agent communicates: voice, tone, and character. Examples: "Patient Mentor", "Senior Commissioning Engineer", "Sardonic Field Tech."

Pick one Personality as a foundation, then stack behavioral Skills on top.

## Quality Scores

Some Templates include a **Quality Score**: an automated evaluation showing how well the Template performs across test scenarios. The score comes from running the agent through realistic test cases and having an AI judge evaluate the responses for accuracy and relevance.

A score of 90%+ means the Template consistently produces high-quality responses for its intended use case.

*AVCodex · Your AV expertise. Amplified by AI.*