Give instructions
Four real levers that shape how an AI teammate behaves — template, skills, profile, and memory — plus what makes an instruction actually land.
Instructing a teammate isn't one thing — it's four separate levers, each suited to a different kind of change. Pick the right one and you stop re-explaining yourself every time.
What shapes how a teammate behaves?
- Template — the role, tone, and working style set when you hire them. See Hire an AI teammate.
- Skills — what they can actually touch beyond the conversation: a repo, the web, an API.
- Profile — the name and bio that describe this specific teammate to your team and to itself.
- Memory — facts and preferences they pick up automatically as you work together. See How AI teammate memory works.
A template gets you most of the way for a generic role. It stops being enough in two situations: the job needs to reach something outside the conversation — a real codebase, a real ticketing system — which no amount of wording fixes, only a skill does; or the job is generic but this specific teammate isn't — your payments reviewer needs to know it's payments, not just "code reviewer." That's what Skills, Profile, and Memory are for, and what the rest of this page covers.
How to shape a teammate's behavior
Step 1: Install skills for what the template doesn't cover
A teammate without skills can read and write messages and reason about text, but it can't touch anything outside the conversation — it can't check today's exchange rate, open a real PR, or send the email it just drafted. A skill closes exactly one of those gaps at a time, scoped to the teammate you install it on.
Open the teammate's DM, click the gear icon, then Skills, and install from the marketplace, a GitHub URL, or a local file. A code-reviewer template doesn't ship GitHub access by default — install a GitHub skill so it can read the actual diff instead of the pasted snippet you'd otherwise have to keep copying in.
See Skills & Plugins for the full install flow and how to read a skill's permissions before adding it.
Step 2: Write a bio that earns its keep
Open Teammate Settings → Profile. The bio is the teammate's self-introduction — it's what your team sees when deciding whether to bring this teammate in, and what the teammate itself reads as a reminder of its job. A bio that just restates the template's role tells nobody anything new:
Vague:
Helps with engineering stuff.
Specific:
Reviews PRs on the payments service for correctness and idempotency before merge. Bring me in early on anything touching webhook retries or Stripe events.
The second version does two jobs a template can't: it names the actual system, and it tells a teammate when to loop this teammate in, not just what they're generically good at.
See Edit an AI teammate's settings for where every Profile field lives.
Step 3: Steer day-to-day work in messages
For anything task-specific, just say it in the message where you're asking for help — your teammate reads the full thread before acting, so it doesn't need to be repeated elsewhere. Be specific about what they're working on, not just the task itself:
Vague:
Review this code.
Specific:
Review this PR for correctness and test coverage first, readability second. We're on a TypeScript + React frontend with a Go backend — flag anything that isn't idiomatic.
Step 4: Let memory carry forward what shouldn't need repeating
A message only steers the task in front of you. If something should hold for every future task — your stack, a team convention, a standing preference — tell your teammate once and it becomes memory instead of a one-off instruction you'll type again next week.
See How AI teammate memory works for how memory is built, viewed, and corrected.
Messages and memory work together, on top of the baseline the template, skills, and profile set: a message steers one task, memory makes a fact stick for every task after it.
Share context
Give your teammate files, docs, and background knowledge.
How AI teammate memory works
How your teammate remembers and uses context over time.
Skills & Plugins
Install real capabilities on a teammate.