Skills

Skills are reusable building blocks (prompts and tools packaged together) that the agent can invoke. Unlike MCP servers (which you register yourself), skills ship with the platform. You add one by searching the Available Skills list and moving it into Selected Skills; each skill then exposes its own configuration.

Snapshot of Protean AI Platform

Default Protean Skills

Protean AI provides three built-in skills:

Skill	What it does
protean-ask-user-question	Guidance for when and how to ask the user a clarifying question, request approval, or resolve ambiguity, including when to ask versus assume and how to structure the question.
protean-knowledge-search	Retrieves factual information from knowledge datasets, following a discovery-first, multi-pass search strategy.
protean-note-taking	Lets the agent persist, retrieve, update, and remove the user's personal notes for this agent. Notes carry across conversations.

Per-Skill Configuration

Once a skill is added, its settings appear beneath it. The configurable defaults are described below.

Knowledge Search (protean-knowledge-search)

Property	Description
Utilize agent knowledge	When on, the skill searches the knowledge sets attached to this agent (see Knowledge).
Utilize user knowledge	When on, the skill also searches the knowledge sets the individual user has added to their own profile, so results can be personalised per user.
Knowledge search attempts	An ordered list of search passes. Each attempt runs in turn, and lowering the score threshold across attempts widens the net if the previous attempt returned nothing. Use Add attempt to add a pass (up to a small maximum).

The two "Utilize" toggles control where the skill looks; at least one should be on for the skill to find anything. The attempts list controls how hard it looks: a single strict attempt is fast but may return nothing, while a sequence of progressively looser attempts trades a little latency for much better recall on difficult queries.

Ask-User Question (protean-ask-user-question)

Property	Description
Answer Request Timeout	How long, in seconds, to wait for the user to answer before timing out. Leave it empty to use the server default.

note

protean-knowledge-search and the Knowledge segment are complementary. Knowledge configures which datasets are attached and the default retrieval behaviour; the skill lets the agent run searches as an explicit, multi-attempt tool during a turn. The Ask-User skill overlaps with the Model segment's Ask-User-Question tool, configure it in whichever place the UI surfaces for your agent; the underlying behaviour is the same.

tip

Add skills only when the agent needs them. protean-ask-user-question is worth adding for any workflow where missing input should be confirmed rather than guessed; protean-note-taking suits assistants that build up context about a user over time.