Teach a task

What this does for you

Recording yourself doing something once on a bot's own computer turns it into a skill the bot can read back and run again on its own.

Before you start

• A bot with its own computer, since the recording is made there — never of your own screen or microphone.
• Ten minutes. A recording stops itself automatically at that mark, whether or not you're finished, so plan to demonstrate one task rather than several.
• Consent, every time: whichever way you start — the composer's + menu, the bot's screen viewer, or hovering its thumbnail — you see the same banner and press Start recording before anything is captured. Nothing records on entry alone.
• A name in mind for the finished skill; you confirm or change it once it's compiled, before anything is saved.

Steps

1. Choose Teach a task from the composer's + menu, or open the bot's screen and choose it there. Either way you see the same banner: "Record yourself doing a task. Inbox Triage learns the steps and can run them again on its own. The screen is recorded; the microphone is not."

   <!-- shot: teach-a-task-01-phone.png | The teach consent banner, before recording starts, on a phone --> <!-- shot: teach-a-task-01-desktop.png | The teach consent banner, before recording starts, on a desktop -->

2. Press Start recording, or the × beside it to leave without recording anything.

3. Demonstrate the task on the bot's own screen. The captured region is framed in the recording colour, the banner now reads "Inbox Triage is watching and learning", and a running clock chip doubles as the stop control.

   <!-- shot: teach-a-task-02-phone.png | A demonstration in progress, with the recording timer, on a phone --> <!-- shot: teach-a-task-02-desktop.png | A demonstration in progress, with the recording timer, on a desktop -->

4. One minute before the ten-minute cap the chip takes a warning colour. At the cap itself the recording stops on its own — you don't need to watch the clock.

5. Press the timer chip to stop and save, or its × to discard the recording instead.

6. Once it's finished, choose Learn from demonstration to compile the footage into a skill. Nothing is written as a skill until you make that choice.

7. Open the saved skill to read its name, description and numbered steps, and try the dry-run offer before you trust it on its own.

A worked example

A compiled skill is a plain markdown document with a fixed shape — a title, a one-line routing summary, then ## Assumptions, ## Inputs and ## Steps as real markdown headings (packages/core/src/skill-doc.ts) — which is what the compiler always writes and what a saved skill's Instructions field holds. Shown here with those three headings in bold instead, so this page's own six sections stay the ones listed above it:

# List downloaded invoices

Use this when you need to see which invoice PDFs have already been downloaded.

**Assumptions**
- Working directory is `/workspace/invoices` unless a different path is named.
- No sign-in is required to read the directory.

**Inputs**
- `{path}` — directory to list. Default: `/workspace/invoices`.

**Steps**
1. Run `ls` in `{path}`.
2. Report the file names, noting which look like duplicates.

The description is written as a routing sentence — "Use this when you need to…" — rather than a summary, because that is what a bot matches against when it's deciding whether this skill applies.

What can go wrong

See also

• Make a routine
• When a routine stops