Skills & guardrails

Skills are what Zinley knows how to do. Guardrails are the lines it won't cross. They live in one library on your account, synced across all your devices — teach Zinley something on your laptop and it knows it on your phone.

The Skills library: a list of skills, each with a name, description, date, and a source tag reading either Learned by Zinley or a device name.
One library of what Zinley knows, synced everywhere.

Each entry shows its name, a one-line description, when it was last updated, and where it came from — a device you wrote it on, or ✨ Learned by Zinley when Zinley wrote it itself while working with you.

Skills

A skill is a repeatable way of doing something: format the Monday exec summary, clean up Docker, file an expense the way my company wants it.

Ask Zinley to write one

The fastest way in is to name the topic and let Zinley draft the skill:

  • "Make a skill for how I format the weekly status report."
  • "Write a skill for onboarding a new client — keep it detailed."
  • "Save what you just did as a skill."

You can steer the style of the write-up: concise (short and to the point), detailed (thorough, with context), or technical (precise, for engineering work).

Teach by showing

This is the one most people don't expect: record your screen doing the task, hand Zinley the recording, and it writes the skill from what it watched you do — the apps you opened, the order you did things in, the fields you filled.

  • Send a screen recording (best — it captures the sequence).
  • Or a set of screenshots of the key steps.
  • Or just text notes of what you did, if that's easier.

Then: "Turn this into a skill." Zinley drafts the steps and suggests a name; you edit anything it got wrong and save.

Improving a skill

Skills get better with use. Ask for a specific kind of edit:

Ask for What Zinley does
Improve Tightens and clarifies what's there
Expand Adds detail, edge cases, and context
Simplify Cuts it down to the essentials
Fix Corrects what's wrong — tell it what went sideways

"That skill missed a step — expand it to cover the approval email."

Writing one by hand

The New skill dialog with Name, a When should your assistant use this field, and an Instructions box pre-filled with a Markdown template.
New skill — name it, say when to use it, and write the steps.
  • Name — a short handle (e.g. Weekly report format).
  • When should your assistant use this? — a clear sentence helps Zinley pick it at the right moment.
  • Instructions — the how-to, in Markdown. The box starts from a template.

Zinley uses its own library

While it works, Zinley reads its own skills to remind itself how you like things done — and refines them mid-task when it learns something better. You'll see entries tagged ✨ Learned by Zinley appear on their own; open any of them to read, edit, or delete.

A skill's detail view showing the title, description, Learned by Zinley tag, the full Markdown instructions, and Delete and Edit buttons.
Detail view — read the full instructions, then Edit or Delete.

Guardrails

A guardrail is a rule Zinley must not break. Same library, same editor, worded for boundaries.

The rules view of the library with a New rule button and rules listed, one tagged Learned by Zinley.
The same library, filtered to guardrails.

Every guardrail carries two extra fields:

  • Severity — how costly the mistake would be: critical, high, medium, or low. Zinley weights the strictest ones hardest.
  • Category — what area it protects: security, code quality, data, git, architecture, or general.
The New rule dialog with Name, a When should your assistant use this field, and an Instructions box pre-filled with a rule template.
The same editor, tuned for what to avoid or always do.

Ask for them the same way you ask for skills:

  • "Add a guardrail: never push straight to main. Make it critical."
  • "Rule — don't send anything with an invoice attached without showing me first."
  • "Make that data rule stricter."

Related