How skills activate
When you send a message, the agent analyzes your intent and matches it against a library of built-in skills. Each skill has a set of trigger conditions — phrases, task types, and contextual signals. When a match is found, the skill’s instruction set is added to the agent’s active context for that turn, guiding how it reasons, what it checks, and how it structures its response. Skills are additive: they add guidance and best-practice structure on top of the agent’s normal behavior. They don’t restrict what you can ask for or limit the agent’s capabilities. If no specific skill matches, the agent proceeds with its default behavior.Multiple skills can be active in the same turn. For example, a complex refactor might simultaneously activate
planning_complex_change, gather_context, and refactor_to_pattern.Built-in skills
Luminy ships with 35 built-in skills. The most commonly triggered ones are described below.Understanding code
Debugging & fixing
Planning & design
Implementation
Quality & verification
Communication
Triggering skill-like behavior explicitly
Because skills activate automatically, you typically don’t need to think about them. However, you can guide the agent toward skill-like behavior by framing your request explicitly:Trigger planning
Say “plan this change before implementing” or “walk me through how you’d approach this” to activate structured planning before any code is written.
Trigger self-review
Say “review what you just wrote” or “check your work before showing me” to activate the self-review pass explicitly.
Trigger root cause analysis
Say “don’t just fix the symptom — find the root cause” to activate systematic root cause reasoning before the agent reaches for a quick patch.
Trigger exploration
Say “explore the codebase first” or “gather context before making changes” to make sure the agent reads the relevant code before acting.