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The Tatara agent skills teach an agent how to work with your brain correctly: the write workflow, the grammar of each document format, and what to do when a write comes back rejected. Tatara validates every write against the document’s canonical format. Without the skills, an agent learns those rules by failing: it sends a body, the gate rejects it, and it guesses again. The skills give it the grammar up front, so the first write passes. They follow the open Agent Skills standard and use only portable frontmatter, so the same skills work in Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, and other tools that support the standard.

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Before you install

The skills are inert on their own. Everything they describe is a call to a Tatara MCP tool, so your agent needs a connected Tatara MCP server first. See Connect an agent.

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Installing

Install all five skills into every agent tool detected on your machine:
Install a single skill:
Target specific agent tools with -a, which is repeatable:

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As a Claude Code plugin

The install identifier is tatara@tatara, not tatara-skills. The plugin and the marketplace are both named tatara, and the plugin bundles all five skills as one unit.

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On claude.ai

Download the repository, zip a folder under skills/, and upload it in claude.ai under Settings → Capabilities → Skills.

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The five skills

One core skill and four format skills.

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How the skills combine

The core tatara skill is always in play. It owns the workflow (search first, resolve the folder, tag from the taxonomy, then write) and the recovery loop when a write is rejected. A format skill loads on top of it when a document needs a rich view, and it governs only the body content. So a plain prose document needs only the core skill. A board needs the core skill and tatara-kanban: the core skill decides where the document is filed and how it is tagged, and tatara-kanban decides what the body bytes look like.

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Choosing between the format skills

See Document formats for what each format requires.

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Board or task checklist

Both use - [ ] checkbox items, so look past the checkbox to where the meaning lives.
  • Choose kanban when the column a card sits in is the state. The work of the document is moving cards between columns.
  • Choose tracker when the metadata on each task is the point: per-task tags, a priority glyph, a 📅 YYYY-MM-DD due date, a ✅ YYYY-MM-DD completion date. Tasks can be grouped under ## Section headings, but the grouping is optional and is not a state machine.

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Table or base

Both render as a grid, which is where the confusion starts. The difference is what owns the rows.
  • A table holds its own data. The rows live in the document body as one pipe table, with a declared type per column.
  • A base holds no data of its own. It is a saved view whose rows are other documents in your brain, selected by filters. The body contains only the query.
Editing a table changes the data. Editing a base changes which documents appear.

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Repository

tatara-app/tatara-skills

The skills are open source under the MIT licence. Read them to see exactly what your agent is told about each format.