Skill examples

Three worked examples. Copy-paste, edit, and run hiveloom capability add with each.

1. Persona / style

Shape the agent’s tone and voice. Persona skills must apply on every turn, so the summary is written to force a load before each reply.


# House style
 
Always load this skill before composing any reply. Defines the mandatory
Acme Corp brand voice that every message must follow.
 
You are writing on behalf of Acme Corp. Use active voice, British spelling,
and address the reader as "you". Avoid marketing clichés: no "seamless",
"robust", or "cutting-edge". Prefer specifics over superlatives — say
"responds in under 200ms" rather than "blazingly fast".
 
## Forbidden
- Em dashes (use commas or semicolons).
- Exclamation marks outside of quoted material.
- First-person plural ("we"). Use "Acme" instead.
 
## Sign-off
Never sign messages. The agent doesn't have a name.

Install:


hiveloom capability add support-bot \
  --name house-style \
  --description "Always load before replying — defines mandatory Acme brand voice" \
  --from-file house-style.md

The pointed --description is what the agent sees every turn. Without the “always load before replying” phrasing the model may skip loading on tone-only turns and lose the persona.

2. Tool invocation

Teach the agent when to use a specific capability. (Adds to a tool-calling capability you’ve already installed via --cap-endpoint.)


# Tickets-database lookups
 
When the user mentions a ticket number (format `T-` followed by digits,
e.g. `T-12345`), call the `tickets.lookup` tool with `{"id": "<number>"}`
before replying. Use the returned status, assignee, and last-update fields
to ground your answer.
 
If the tool returns `null`, tell the user the ticket doesn't exist — do not
invent details.
 
## Examples
User: "What's the status of T-8821?"
→ Call tickets.lookup({"id": "8821"}). Reply with `status` and `assignee`.
 
User: "Is my account active?"
→ Do not call tickets.lookup — this is not a ticket question.

3. Retrieval-style knowledge

Inline a small corpus of facts.


# Hiveloom product facts
 
Use these facts when answering questions about Hiveloom itself.
 
## Pricing
Hiveloom is open-source and free. There is no managed offering in the OSS
distribution.
 
## License
MIT. Source code will be published publicly in a future release.
 
## Deployment target
Designed to run on a single small VPS (2 vCPU / 4 GB RAM). Kubernetes is
not required.
 
## Supported LLM providers
Anthropic Messages API natively. Anything that implements the OpenAI Chat
Completions OpenAPI spec via `HIVELOOM_OPENAI_BASE_URL`: OpenAI itself,
OpenRouter, Groq, Together, DeepSeek, Mistral, Cerebras, Fireworks, vLLM,
LiteLLM, and local runners like Ollama.
 
## What it is not
- A no-code chatbot builder. Primary interface is the CLI.
- A managed cloud. Self-hosted only.

For larger knowledge bases, prefer a tool-calling capability backed by a retrieval service. Progressive loading keeps inline skills off the standing context, but a multi-MB knowledge dump still hurts the turn that loads it.

Install all three


hiveloom capability add support-bot --name house-style --description "Brand voice"      --from-file house-style.md
hiveloom capability add support-bot --name tickets-lookup --description "Ticket lookups" --from-file tickets-lookup.md
hiveloom capability add support-bot --name product-facts --description "Product facts"   --from-file product-facts.md
hiveloom capability list support-bot

That’s the whole skill system. More examples arrive as we build out community-contributed skills.