QoderWork: Building and Using Custom Skills

QoderWork is a desktop AI agent that autonomously executes multi-step tasks on your Mac — file organization, data analysis, document creation, and more. Skills are the extensibility layer that lets you supercharge it with reusable automation modules, both from the community marketplace and ones you build yourself.

This tutorial covers everything: navigating the Skills Marketplace, installing and managing Skills, and authoring your own custom Skill from scratch with a proper file structure.

Prerequisites

• QoderWork desktop app installed on your local machine
• An active Qoder account (free tier works)
• Basic familiarity with JSON/YAML and Markdown

Project Structure

Before diving in, here's the file layout for a custom Skill you'll build in this tutorial:

my-skill/
├── SKILL.md          # Required — skill metadata (YAML frontmatter + description)
├── prompt.md         # The task template with variables
├── config.json       # Optional — default parameters and settings
└── README.md         # Optional — human-readable docs

When you install a custom Skill, you zip this folder and drag it into QoderWork. The only required file is SKILL.md at the root of the zip.

Step 1: Explore the Skills Marketplace

1. Open QoderWork and click Skills in the left sidebar.
2. You'll land on the Skills Marketplace tab — browse Official Selection and Other Skills.
3. Use the Filter dropdown to narrow by category (for example: Content Creation, Data & AI, Design & UI, DevOps & Deployment, Docs & Writing, Productivity, Research & Analysis).

Notable built-in marketplace Skills include deep-research, cloudflare-deploy, notion-infographic, file-organizer, and frontend-design.

1. Switch to the Built-in tab to see Skills that ship with QoderWork: agent-browser, docx, pdf, pptx, xlsx, find-skills, and install-skill-dependency.
2. Switch to User-installed to manage Skills you've added — both from the market and locally installed ones.

Step 2: Install a Marketplace Skill

Installing from the marketplace takes one click:

1. In the Skills Marketplace tab, click any skill card (e.g., deep-research).
2. Click Install.
3. The skill appears in your User-installed tab with a toggle to enable/disable it.
4. When an update is available, an Update badge appears — click it to pull the latest version.

To install a custom or third-party Skill as a .zip file:

1. Click + Install skill (top-right corner).
2. In the dialog, drag and drop your .zip file or click to browse.
3. The zip must contain SKILL.md at the root — see file requirements below.
4. Click Install.

Step 3: Create Your First Custom Skill

We'll build a weekly-report Skill that scans a project folder and generates a Markdown summary of the week's changes.

3a. Create the folder structure

mkdir -p ~/skills/weekly-report
cd ~/skills/weekly-report

3b. Create SKILL.md

This is the only required file. The YAML frontmatter defines metadata; the body is the trigger description QoderWork uses to decide when to invoke the Skill.

name: weekly-report
version: 1.0.0
description: >
  Scans a specified project folder for files modified in the past 7 days
  and generates a weekly-report-{date}.md summary with changes, action
  items, and a file diff overview. Trigger when the user asks for a
  weekly summary, weekly report, or week-in-review for a folder.
category: Productivity
author: your-name


## Weekly Report Skill

Generates a structured weekly report from any local project folder.
Useful for standups, client updates, and personal progress tracking.

### When to trigger
- User says "create a weekly report for [folder]"
- User says "summarize this week's changes in [folder]"
- User asks for a "week in review" of a directory

### Variables
- `{{folder}}` — absolute or relative path to the project folder
- `{{date}}` — auto-filled with today's date (YYYY-MM-DD)
- `{{format}}` — output format, default is `markdown`

3c. Create prompt.md

This is the task template sent to the AI when the Skill is triggered.

# Task: Weekly Report for {{folder}}

Scan the folder at `{{folder}}` and perform the following steps:

1. **List modified files** — find all files modified in the last 7 days.
   Include file name, path, size, and last-modified timestamp.

2. **Categorize changes** — group files by type:
   - New files (created this week)
   - Modified files (changed but not new)
   - Deleted files (if detectable via git or trash)

3. **Extract action items** — scan `.md`, `.txt`, and `.docx` files for
   lines containing TODO, ACTION, FIXME, or [ ] checkbox syntax.

4. **Generate report** — write the output to:
   `{{folder}}/weekly-report-{{date}}.md`

   Use this structure:

# Weekly Report — {{date}}

## Summary

• X files modified, Y files created, Z action items found

## Modified Files

## Action Items

• [ ] Item from file.md
• [ ] Another item

## Notes

_Auto-generated by QoderWork weekly-report Skill_

5. **Confirm completion** — respond with the path to the generated report.

3d. Create config.json

Optional defaults that pre-fill Skill variables:

{
  "defaults": {
    "format": "markdown",
    "lookback_days": 7,
    "include_hidden": false,
    "action_item_keywords": ["TODO", "ACTION", "FIXME", "[ ]"]
  },
  "permissions": {
    "file_access": "read-write",
    "scope": "specified_folder_only"
  }
}

3e. Create README.md

# weekly-report Skill

Generates a Markdown weekly report from any local project folder.

## Usage

In QoderWork chat, type:

Create a weekly report for ~/Projects/my-app

Or invoke directly with:

@weekly-report folder=~/Projects/my-app

## Output

Creates `weekly-report-YYYY-MM-DD.md` in the target folder.

## Permissions Required

Read-write access to the target folder.

Step 4: Package and Install Your Skill

cd ~/skills
zip -r weekly-report.zip weekly-report/

Your zip should look like:

weekly-report.zip
└── weekly-report/
    ├── SKILL.md        ← required, must be at root of the folder
    ├── prompt.md
    ├── config.json
    └── README.md

Now install it:

1. In QoderWork → Skills → click + Install skill
2. Drag weekly-report.zip into the dialog
3. Click Install
4. It appears in User-installed → Local install

Step 5: Use Your Skill

With the Skill installed, trigger it in two ways:

Create a weekly report for ~/Projects/my-saas-app

@weekly-report folder=~/Projects/my-saas-app

QoderWork will show the execution plan before running. Review it, then click Execute.

Step 6: Use the Built-in create-skill Helper

QoderWork has a built-in create-skill Skill that guides you interactively. In the chat, type:

Help me create a skill using create-skill. Please detect the current
environment first and save the skill to the correct path: in a VM
environment, save to /root/.qoderwork/skills/; otherwise save to
~/.qoderwork/skills/. First, ask me what the skill should do.

QoderWork will interview you about the Skill's purpose and generate the SKILL.md automatically, saving it to the correct local path.

Step 7: MCP Integration in Skills

Skills can invoke MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers for external integrations. Reference an MCP tool in prompt.md like this:

# Task: Deploy to Cloudflare

Use the `cloudflare-deploy` MCP tool to:
1. Build the project at `{{project_path}}`
2. Deploy to Cloudflare Workers
3. Return the live URL

Configure MCP servers under Settings → Integrations → MCP before using them in Skills.

Troubleshooting

Next Steps

• Browse the Skills Marketplace for community Skills like notion-infographic, frontend-design, and analytics-data-analysis
• Chain multiple Skills in a single task prompt for complex multi-stage workflows
• Share your Skills with the community by publishing to the QoderWork marketplace via Create with QoderWork in the Skills interface
• Explore MCP server integrations at Settings → Integrations → MCP to connect external APIs and services