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The knowledge of how to drive a brain ships as skills, so an agent learns the contract rather than guessing at it. The paper treats a skill as one of a brain’s access contracts, alongside the CLI itself: the knowledge of how to drive this travels with the brain rather than living only in vitruvio’s docs.
That installs them into your agent’s skills directory. The CLI carries the same set and can install it itself — which is the one to use when the skills must match the exact binary they drive:
An existing skill directory is left alone unless --force, because a consumer may have edited one and silently overwriting local edits is not something a copy command should do.

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What ships

Eleven skills, layered rather than exhaustive. vitruvio is the entry point and the others are reached from it, so install the set rather than one of them. Ask your agent to set up a brain and the vitruvio-onboarding skill walks it through the same steps as the Onboarding section of these docs — including stopping to ask you whether the brain is governed.

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The five habits the skills teach

  1. Always --json, and branch on ok then error.code.
  2. Read warnings even when ok is true — a degraded answer that looks clean is the failure the design is arranged to prevent.
  3. The brain returns evidence; you write the prose. There is no answer field.
  4. Never invent a block_id.
  5. Search first. search runs the planner over the indices and is the only read that ranks; inspect blocks is an unranked inventory and the last resort, after query explain and a rebuilt index have not helped.

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Where they are authored

The files live at skills/ in the repository root and ship inside the wheel, which ties a skill to the version of the CLI it documents. The command reference the entry skill carries is generated from the command declarations, and CI fails if it is stale — a stale reference is worse than none, because an agent that trusts a flag which no longer exists spends its next turn recovering from a usage error.

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Next

Create your first brain.