Why use Skills?
Skills let you decouple what you want the model to do from how it’s configured:- Reusable: Create a skill once, reference it from any endpoint (image, document, video, audio, agent)
- Versionable: Pin a specific skill version for reproducible results, or use
"latest"to always get the newest revision - Composable: Pass multiple skills in a single request
- Auto-generated: Create skills from a prompt, a chat session, or a pre-built skill zip
- Flexible: Use skills as an alternative to domains, or combine them with custom schemas
- Inline: Send skill bundles directly in the request as base64-encoded zips — no pre-upload required
Skill Identifiers
Each skill can be referenced by name and version, or by its unique ID:| Field | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
skill_id | Unique identifier (UUID or name string) | "abc-123-def" |
skill_name | Human-readable name for lookup | "invoice-extraction" |
skill_version | Skill version to use | "latest" |
skill_name or skill_id. When using skill_name, you can also specify a skill_version, otherwise the latest version is used.
Skills vs Domains
Skills are the preferred way to extract structured data from images, documents, videos, and audio.When
skills are provided and domain is omitted, the platform creates a dynamic application from the skill’s prompt and JSON schema. You can still pass domain alongside skills if needed.| Domains | Skills | |
|---|---|---|
| Lookup | Fixed string (e.g. "document.invoice") | Name + version (e.g. "invoice-extraction" @ "latest") |
| Custom prompts | Via config.prompt | Bundled with the skill |
| JSON schema | Pre-defined per domain | Bundled with the skill |
| Versioning | N/A | Explicit version pinning |
| Usage | domain parameter | config.skills parameter |
Where Skills Work
Skills work across all of the following VLM Run products:| Type | Skills Parameter |
|---|---|
| Model Requests | config.skills |
| Agent Executions | config.skills |
| Chat Completions | skills |
Quickstart
Get started with skills in under 2 minutes
Skill Spec
Learn how skills are structured