CoCo is Snowflake's AI coding assistant. Out of the box it can query your data, write SQL, and explore your account, and more. One of its key capabilities is also being able to teach it new, repeatable workflows through skills.

A skill is a small Markdown file that tells CoCo how to complete a specific task. Skills allow you to turn tasks that have a known and repeatable structure into something CoCo does consistently every time. Once you add a skill, it shows up in either CoCo's skill picker ($skill-name) or command picker (/skill-name) where anyone on your team can invoke it.

You don't have to write a CoCo skill manually because CoCo ships with a built-in skill called Skill Development (skill-development) that interviews you and writes the skill on your behalf.

In this guide, you'll play the role of a marketer at Peak Outfitters, a fictional outdoor-gear company. Your marketing team wants everyone – even non-technical team members – to be able to draft launch emails and slide outlines that follow the company's brand voice and style guidelines. Instead of asking everyone to memorize the style guide, you'll build a reusable brand-content skill that does it for them.

Before building a skill, it helps to understand what CoCo is actually reading. A skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md file. That file has two parts:

1. Frontmatter – a small block at the top (between --- fences) with two fields:

Here's what the frontmatter does:

2. Body – plain Markdown that teaches CoCo how to do the task. The Create your own skill documentation describes the structure, but the common sections are:

That's it! A skill is just a description of a job, formatted as a Markdown text file that is written so CoCo can follow it. You don't have to write this file yourself – the Skill Development skill will do it for you.

Before we build one, it's worth understanding: when is a skill actually worth creating?

Before you build anything, it's good practice to check whether a relevant skill already exists. CoCo ships with a large library of built-in skills, and your team may have published more – so search first using the built-in /find-skill skill:

CoCo will search the catalog and lists anything that matches, ready to install in one step. In our case nothing fits our use case, so we'll build one.

Note that not every task will deserve a skill. Building one for the wrong thing just adds clutter to your / picker. The signal to watch for is repetition with structure: you catch yourself doing the same kind of task more than once – the same rough steps, the same shape – just with different inputs each time. This could be things like drafting a launch email every quarter, standing up a new data pipeline the same way each time, running the same checks before you ship a change. Those are skills waiting to happen. A true one-off, or something open-ended and creative with no repeatable shape, usually isn't worth capturing as a skill.

Here are a couple of important things to keep in mind when building a skill:

Once you've spotted a good candidate, there are a couple of ways to turn it into a skill:

This guide uses the skill-development skill to build a single skill – the same create-from-scratch workflow works in the CoCo CLI and CoCo Desktop. In the Snowsight UI, you create a skill with + Create Skill instead. (CoCo Desktop also bundles a plugin-creator skill, but that scaffolds a whole plugin – a container that packages one or more skills for sharing – which is more than you need for a single skill.) Either way you end up with a SKILL.md in your skills folder, and everything after this step works identically. The Use Your Skill in CoCo Desktop, the CLI, and Snowsight section below covers the differences.

CoCo includes a built-in skill called Skill Development whose entire job is to help you build other skills. Let's start it.

In the CoCo prompt, type / to open the skill picker, then choose skill-development (or type $skill-development). Tell CoCo what you want to build:

The Skill Development skill recognizes this as a create request and begins interviewing you. It will ask for the essentials of your new skill:

You should see CoCo ask you to confirm these details before it writes anything. This is a deliberate checkpoint – the skill pauses so you can correct course before any files are created.

Answer CoCo's questions with the details for our brand-content skill. You can paste something like this:

A note on triggers: list the everyday phrases your teammates would actually type, not just the obvious ones. A good description casts a wide net – "launch email" and "announcement" should both trigger brand-content, even if a user never types the word "brand."

CoCo will confirm your requirements, then propose a structure for the skill and pause again for your approval. For our case it will suggest a single SKILL.md plus a small references file to hold the brand guidelines – content that the skill only needs to load when it's actually drafting. Approve the structure to continue.

Once you approve the structure, CoCo writes the skill. It creates a SKILL.md similar to this:

Here's what this skill does:

Next, create the guidelines file that the skill relies on. Ask CoCo to add references/brand-guidelines.md next to the SKILL.md, with your team's actual voice, terminology, structure rules, and calls to action. A short version of this file could look like this:

Keep this reference file short. It's loaded into CoCo's context on demand, so trimming it to the rules that matter keeps the skill fast and focused.

Skills live in a skills folder that CoCo watches. When you let CoCo write the skill, it places the files there for you – a brand-content/ folder containing your SKILL.md and the references/brand-guidelines.md file. The exact folder depends on which surface you're using (for example, .cortex/skills/ in the CLI, or .snowflake/cortex/skills/ in CoCo Desktop and the Snowsight UI) – the Use Your Skill in CoCo Desktop, the CLI, and Snowsight section below has the full breakdown.

There's no separate skill registration step. The skill becomes available the next time you open the / picker.

Let's use it. Open the / picker, choose brand-content, and give it a brief:

Here's what you should see:

You've just turned your brand guidelines into a repeatable workflow that anyone on the team can run – without reading the style guide.

CoCo comes in three places: the Desktop app, the CLI, and inside Snowsight in your browser. The brand-content skill you just built works the same in all three – you invoke it by typing / – but where skills live and how you create and share them differs a little by surface.

A few things worth knowing:

A skill that lives only on your machine only helps you. If everyone builds their own version, you're back to five slightly different launch emails. The fix is to publish it to the Skills Catalog, Snowflake's governed registry for skills. Once it's there, teammates find and install the same version, with access controlled by Snowflake roles.

How you publish depends on your surface:

However you publish, teammates then discover it with find-skill (or by pasting a share link) and install it in one step – so everyone runs the same brand-content skill.

As your toolkit grows – say brand-content, a launch-checklist skill, and a competitor-scan skill – you don't have to share them one at a time. A plugin is the container that bundles related skills (and optionally hooks or MCP servers) into a single installable unit. On CoCo Desktop, ask the plugin-creator skill to package them:

Now a teammate installs the whole toolkit in one step instead of hunting for each piece.

The skill you built is a single SKILL.md plus one reference file – and for most tasks, that's all you'll ever need. As your skills take on bigger jobs, two patterns help them grow without becoming slow or unwieldy.

References – offload the detail. You already used this pattern. Keep the instructions in SKILL.md and move bulky or frequently-changing detail into a references/ file that CoCo loads only when it's needed. Your brand guidelines are a perfect example: the workflow rarely changes, but the guidelines do – and Marketing can update brand-guidelines.md without ever touching the workflow. Reach for a reference file when content is long, or when someone other than the skill's author owns it.

Sub-skills – split by branch. When a single skill starts covering clearly separate jobs, split it. Imagine your brand-content skill grew to handle emails, slide decks, and social posts. Instead of one long file, you'd use a small "router" SKILL.md that detects which job the user wants, plus a sub-folder for each branch. CoCo loads only the branch that matches the request, so the other two never take up context.

The guiding principle: CoCo shares a limited context window across your whole conversation, so a lean, focused skill is a faster and more reliable skill. Start simple, and only add structure when the skill actually needs it.

Here's how the same skill could look as it grows:

A quick point of guidance: reach for a reference file when the detail is bulky or owned by someone else, and reach for sub-skills when the skill has clearly separate jobs.

The Skill Development skill can set up either structure for you – just describe what you want. For the structural specifics, see the Create your own skill documentation.

Some of the best skills don't start as ideas at all – they start as work you just finished. Say you spent this morning with CoCo drafting Peak Outfitters' spring launch email: you pasted in the brief, went back and forth on the hook, tightened the call to action, and landed on something you're happy with. Next quarter you'll do the whole thing again from scratch – unless you capture it now, while the workflow is still fresh.

So instead of describing a new skill, point CoCo at the session you just had:

CoCo reads back through the conversation, works out the repeatable workflow underneath it, and drafts a SKILL.md that generalizes the specifics – turning "this quarter's spring email" into "any launch email" – pausing at the same review checkpoints you saw earlier. The difference from building an idea from scratch is that you've already proven the workflow works, so you're not guessing at the steps; you're just saving the ones you already ran. That's what makes this so useful: the next time the task comes around, it's one command.

This is worth keeping in the back of your mind as you work. Any time you finish something with CoCo and think "I'll be doing this again," that's a good cue to capture it as a skill.

Skills are living documents. As your needs grow, the Skill Development skill can help you improve them, too. Invoke $skill-development again and describe what you want:

This guide walked through one skill end to end – the mechanics of what a skill is made of, the best practices for when and how to build one, and how to use and design skills across CoCo Desktop, the CLI, and Snowsight. We kept the example deliberately simple and aimed it at non-technical teammates, but that's just one shape a skill can take. You can build a skill for almost anything you do repeatedly, and the same mechanics apply.

Here are a few ideas by role:

You don't always have to start from scratch. CoCo ships with a large library of built-in skills spanning warehouses, dynamic tables, dbt, Iceberg, semantic views, dashboards, Cortex Agents, machine learning, document intelligence, data quality, lineage, governance, sharing, and cost management. Before you build, check whether one already covers what you need – and reading existing skills is one of the best ways to learn to write your own.

To browse what's available:

For the full catalog, see the CoCo CLI bundled skills reference.

If you only built this skill to follow along, you can remove it. Delete the skill folder CoCo created – the brand-content/ directory and everything inside it. Once it's gone, it will no longer appear in the / picker.

You built a working CoCo skill without writing a single line of code. By using the built-in Skill Development skill, you described what you wanted in plain English, reviewed what CoCo generated at each checkpoint, and ended up with a reusable brand-content skill your whole team can run from the / picker.

This same pattern works for almost any repeatable task – onboarding checklists, code-review conventions, data-request intake, release notes. If your team does it more than once, you can turn it into a skill.