Building apps
What is skills (reusable instructions)?
Skills are reusable sets of instructions in Bolt.new that the platform applies to your builds, so conventions and requirements carry across sessions and projects without being restated in every prompt.
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Technical definition
A skill is a stored instruction set that Bolt.new applies during a build, supplying standing context that would otherwise have to be included in each prompt. Skills serve the same function for a build that a system prompt serves for a model conversation: they establish rules that persist rather than applying to one request.
Because skills live outside the conversation, they survive context trimming on long projects, where instructions given 40 messages ago may no longer be visible to the model.
In plain terms
A skill is a set of instructions you write once and Bolt.new follows every time.
Rather than telling it your stack preferences, your coding standards, and your accessibility requirements at the start of every project, you store them and they apply.
Why it matters
The problem skills solve is drift. On a long build, an AI stops following a rule you set early, and the reason is mechanical rather than mysterious: the conversation outgrew the context window, and the earliest instructions fell out of what the model can see.
That is also why restating rules in prompts is unreliable at scale. It works for a short project and degrades on a long one.
For an agency or anyone shipping repeatedly, the value is consistency across projects rather than within one. Your conventions, your security requirements, and your accessibility standards applied to every client build, without depending on whoever wrote that day's prompts remembering them.
What belongs in a skill: things that are true every time. Stack preferences, code conventions, security requirements, accessibility standards, patterns you always want and ones you never do. What does not: anything specific to one project, which belongs in the prompt.
