Skills

confab setup ships one bundled skill — a slash command that gets installed into your provider CLIs (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode) and that you invoke from inside an active session. It’s pre-wired to talk to the backend you authed against during setup, so there’s no extra config.

How skills are installed

When you run confab setup, the CLI:

1. Auto-detects which provider CLIs (claude, codex, opencode) are on your PATH.
2. For each detected provider, writes the skill’s SKILL.md into the provider’s skills directory:
   • Claude Code: ~/.claude/skills/<skill>/SKILL.md
   • Codex: ~/.codex/skills/<skill>/SKILL.md
   • OpenCode: ~/.config/opencode/skills/<skill>/SKILL.md
3. If you’d previously customized the skill, the existing file is backed up to SKILL.md.bak before being overwritten — so re-running setup never silently drops your edits.

You can install or remove skills manually with confab skills add / confab skills remove (see Commands).

The bundled skill is:

/retro — Session retrospective

Fetches and discusses a session you (or a teammate) ran earlier. Useful for reviewing what happened, extracting learnings, or critiquing the approach.

Three things /retro is good for:

• Replay your own work. Pull a previous session’s condensed transcript into a fresh agent so you can pick up where you left off, even days later.
• Learn from teammates. Load a teammate’s session — even one run in a different provider — and reference how they solved a tricky problem.
• Synthesize a reusable skill. When a session captures a workflow worth keeping, ask the agent to distill it into a Claude Code, Codex, or OpenCode skill on the spot.

Usage

Inside a fresh Claude Code, Codex, or OpenCode session:

/retro <session-id> [optional question or focus]

<session-id> is the ID shown on your Confabulous dashboard. The optional trailing text steers the discussion.

The agent:

1. Calls confab retro to fetch the condensed transcript plus structured metadata.
2. Writes the JSON and XML output to a timestamped directory under /tmp/retro-<timestamp>/.
3. Searches for the local raw transcript file (richer than the backend’s condensed view) and reads relevant sections for deeper analysis.
4. Summarizes the session conversationally — what happened, key outcomes, cost, duration, model.
5. If you supplied a question or focus area, answers it; otherwise opens up to general discussion.

Under the hood

RETRO_DIR="/tmp/retro-$(date +%s)"
confab retro --output-dir "$RETRO_DIR" <session-id>

This writes two files (response.json and transcript.xml) into the output directory. The skill’s prompt is in SKILL.md and is what teaches the agent how to use them.

Customizing or replacing skills

The SKILL.md files are plain markdown — you can edit them in place. Your edits are preserved across confab setup runs (a .bak is written before overwrite).

To pin a customized version: edit SKILL.md, then run confab status to confirm the skill is still recognized as installed. To revert: delete the file and run confab skills add.

To author entirely new skills for your team’s workflow, drop a SKILL.md into the provider’s skills directory directly — Confabulous doesn’t restrict what skills can live there beyond its own bundled set.