Official skills catalog

Platos ships with a small set of first-party skills you can toggle on without authoring a manifest. Each one is seeded on agent boot, lives under apps/agent/src/skills/official/, and follows the same Claude-skills format any imported skill uses.

What it is

The official catalogue currently includes:

platos-code-runner: sandboxed Python and shell execution via E2B. Tools include execute_python, execute_shell, read_file, write_file, list_dir, plus a MinIO bridge so the agent can reference uploaded attachments and emit output files. Requires E2B_API_KEY.
csv-ops: streaming CSV operations (filter, group, aggregate, pivot, join) without loading the file into the LLM context. Useful for the "30k-row Excel" workload that would otherwise blow the context window. No external env required.
file-operations: read, write, and edit files inside the conversation's attachment scope. Pairs naturally with code-runner.
image-generation: generate images via OpenAI or Anthropic image endpoints. Requires the matching provider key.
web-search: search the web through a configurable provider. Requires WEB_SEARCH_API_KEY.
parallel-web: multi-result fetch with parallel requests, rate-limited.
platos-rag: retrieval over a project-scoped vector index, with a retrieve tool plus a prompt block that tells the model when to query.

Each skill ships a *.skill.md manifest, a typed handler in skill-handlers.ts, and a token estimator. The OfficialSkillsSeederService reads the directory at boot and upserts a PlatosSkill row per slug for every project that does not already have one.

Why it matters

Official skills are how Platos solves the "I want my agent to crunch a CSV" or "I want the agent to run a Python script in a sandbox" problem without each fork re-implementing the wrapper. They are tested against pinned versions, run inside the same scope and budget rails as any other tool, and are the first things you turn on for a fresh agent.

platos-rag deserves a callout: it is not just a retrieval block, it is a tool the model decides to call. That means the model can choose to skip retrieval on simple turns, fan out across multiple sub-queries, or chain retrieval with code execution, all while the runtime tracks cost and citations.

How to use it

Enable for an agent

From the dashboard, navigate to the Skills tab on an agent's detail page, then toggle the skill on. If the skill has required_env and any are missing, the toggle stays off and points you at Providers or the environment variables panel.

Code-runner sandbox lifecycle

platos-code-runner provisions an E2B sandbox at first tool call within a turn and reuses it for the remainder of that turn. Files uploaded to the conversation are mounted at /mnt/attachments. Output files written to /mnt/outputs are picked up at turn end and uploaded to MinIO as artifacts. Wall-clock and CPU caps are enforced by E2B itself; Platos enforces a token budget on top.

Disable a seeded skill

Set the PLATOS_DISABLED_SKILLS env var to a comma-separated list of slugs. The seeder skips disabled slugs at boot. Agents that already had the skill toggled on retain the row but the runtime refuses to attach its tools.

Test a skill before shipping

The official catalogue lives next to its tests (*.test.ts). When you fork and add a skill, ship a parallel .test.ts that runs against testcontainers (no mocks). The Platos test bar is the same for official and imported skills.

Common pitfalls

E2B charges per-second of sandbox runtime. A long-lived turn that holds a sandbox open is more expensive than two short turns. Code-runner releases the sandbox at turn end automatically, but spawn_bgo calls inherit the pricing.
platos-rag only retrieves from indices the agent has access to. Cross-project retrieval is rejected at the auth layer.
The seeder runs every boot. If you renamed a slug locally, the old row stays and a new row is created. Clean up old rows before relying on slug uniqueness.
csv-ops opens files via the file-operations bridge. It does not pull from external URLs; upload first.

Skills: the manifest format and import flow shared by all skills.
Artifacts: code-runner output files and image-generation results land as artifacts.
Attachments and files: code-runner reads the conversation's attachment scope.