Explore Skills in Agentforce Vibes

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Distinguish the difference between skill and rules in Agentforce Vibes.
  
• Identify the components of an Agentforce Vibes skill.
  
• Explain how progressive loading works in Agentforce Vibes.
  

Building a Salesforce application from scratch usually means managing multiple moving parts. You need a data model, business logic, a user interface, application assembly, and security—each with best practices that take time and expertise to get right.

What if your developer agent already knew your team’s conventions, org’s requirements, and Salesforce best practices? With Agentforce Vibes Skills, it can take one complex request and generate deployment-ready code and metadata.

What Are Skills?

Skills are modular packages that equip your developer agent with domain-specific knowledge. Agentforce Vibes invokes skills only when relevant to your request, which gives you targeted, context-aware assistance instead of one-size-fits-all responses. These instructions encode Salesforce best practices, correct metadata structure, and deployment-ready patterns for each specific file type.

How Agentforce Vibes Builds Apps with Skills

When you ask Agentforce Vibes to build a Lightning application, it coordinates multiple specialized skills to create the application components. This skill breaks down complex project requirements into manageable pieces, creates a structured build plan, and executes specialized skills across five phases.

• Data model
  
• Business logic
  
• User interface
  
• Application assembly
  
• Security
  

As each metadata type is created, its corresponding skill ensures that the correct structure, component dependencies, and best practices are met to build a deployable application. Agentforce Vibes can deploy the generated metadata to your Salesforce org. In just a few minutes, you can build a working application. Build smarter with Agentforce Vibes Skills.

Skills Are More Than Just Fancy Rules

You might be wondering whether a skill is just a rule file with a different name. Not quite.

A rule is a single markdown (MD) file that applies broadly. A skill is packaged as a folder that contains a required SKILL.md file—and optionally, reference docs, templates, and scripts—and it loads progressively. That means Agentforce Vibes only pulls in a skill’s full instructions and any bundled resources when your request actually needs them. This progressive data loading keeps the agent efficient and focused instead of loading everything all the time.

Anatomy of a Skill

A folder must contain a SKILL.md file, and that file must include a header with the skill name and description, and instructions for the agent. You can also include other files and folders in a skill, such as documentation or script files.

skills/<your-skill-name>/
├── SKILL.md        # Required — frontmatter + instructions
├── references/     # Optional — detailed docs, examples
└── assets/         # Optional — templates, schemas

Write Descriptions That Trigger Correctly

The agent uses a skill’s description to decide when to progressively load the rest of the skill. Consider these practices when you write descriptions.

• Start with an action verb that describes what the skill does.
  
• Include phrases that users are likely to use when triggering it.
  
• Mention specific file types, tools, and domains the skill covers.
  
• Validate your descriptions. Try different phrasings of a request to confirm the skill triggers as expected.
  

The core of a skill is a workflow—the step-by-step instructions that tell the agent what to do. Once the skill runs correctly, you can add troubleshooting guidance later if needed.

How Progressive Loading Works

• Metadata (at startup): The agent reviews the skill's name and description.
  
• Instructions (when triggered): The full SKILL.md body loads.
  
• Resources (as needed): The bundled files in the references/, assets/, or scripts/ subdirectories load.
  

Naming Convention

Skills are named in kebab-case and follow a domain-first pattern.

Here are some examples of built-in Salesforce skills.

Skill Types

Project skills are scoped to your current workspace, stored in .vibes/skills/. Commit them to version control so your whole team benefits.

Salesforce built-in skills are included in Agentforce Vibes, and you can use them for common development tasks.

Skills change frequently. Skill names, file paths, and internal structure can change or be removed. Skills don’t carry the same backward-compatibility guarantees as Salesforce platform APIs or GA features. For the current skills, check the sf-skills repository in GitHub.

Create, View, Manage and Skills in Agentforce Vibes

It’s easy to get started and update skills.

Here’s how to create a skill.

1. Select + Add Skill in the Skills panel.
   
2. Enter a name in kebab-case, such as my-skill.
   
3. Select a scope, such as project or global.
   
4. Enter a description that summarizes what the skill does.
   
5. Write the content, which is the domain knowledge the agent should apply when the skill is relevant.
   
6. Select Add Skill.
   

Here’s how to view and manage skills.

1. Open the Agentforce Vibes panel.
   
2. Select the Toolkit tab.
   
3. Select Skills. The panel presents all of the available skills, and includes toggles to enable or disable each one.
   

Summary

Skills for Agentforce Vibes gives your developer agent org-specific and Salesforce expertise exactly when it’s needed. Unlike single-file rules, you package skills as folders and load them progressively. This conserves context and token cost while still delivering the depth needed to produce deployable metadata and code. Whether you use built-in Salesforce skills or create custom project skills, Agentforce Vibes uses them to plan, build, and deploy applications across five phases in minutes.

Resources

• GitHub: forcedotcom/sf-skills
• Trailhead: Agentforce Vibes IDE Fundamentals
• Salesforce Help: Agentforce Vibes Developer Guide