Org rules & skills

Last updated October 7, 2026

Write your organization's rules once and publish your team's skills, and every Tempr agent your members run follows them: the CLI, Tempr Code, VS Code, JetBrains and Visual Studio.

What you can publish

Owners and admins manage all four on the Portal's Agent playbook page. Nothing changes for your members until you add something.

Rules

A rule has a title and a body, and is either required or recommended:

The agent reads your rules in the order on the page, before the workspace's own files (AGENTS.md, .github/copilot-instructions.md, CLAUDE.md and the others it reads), and each section's heading tells the model which wins a conflict. Keep rules short and concrete: they go on every model call, so every word costs tokens. The page shows the total size and roughly how many tokens it adds.

Skills

A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md and, optionally, other text files such as references, scripts and templates. It uses the open Agent Skills format, so a skill written for Claude Code or Codex works unchanged:

---
name: release-hotfix
description: Ship a hotfix to production. Use when the user asks to release, patch or hotfix.
---

# Releasing a hotfix

1. Branch from the last release tag.
2. Follow the checklist in references/checklist.md.

• name: up to 64 lowercase letters, digits and single hyphens, and the same as the skill's folder.
• description: up to 1,024 characters saying what the skill does and when to use it. The agent decides from this alone, so say when.
• Other frontmatter fields, such as Claude Code's allowed-tools, are kept in the file and ignored.

Add a skill by uploading a .zip of its folder or a single SKILL.md, or by writing it on the page. The agent's prompt lists only each skill's name and description; when a task matches one, it reads the skill, and any file it mentions, with its skill tool. A hundred skills cost little until one is used. Like rules, a skill is required or recommended: a member can switch off a recommended one.

Scripts in a skill are only text to the agent. Running one goes through the client's normal command tool, and its approvals.

Skills in a project

The agent also finds skills on the member's machine, in the folders other agents use: .tempr/skills, .agents/skills and .claude/skills in the workspace, and ~/.agents/skills (the CLI and Tempr Code also read their own folder, ~/.tempr/skills or ~/.tempr-code/skills). When a project's skill has the same name as one of your organization's, yours wins and the project's is listed as workspace:name.

Who gets each rule and skill

Everyone in the organization, unless you choose groups or members. Groups are the ones on the Portal's Groups page, which also decide Tool Packs: make them there, or mirror them from your company directory so someone who changes team gets the new team's playbook without anyone editing it. Preview as a member on the page shows exactly what one member's agent is given.

Where it applies

On agent turns that run on Tempr's servers, the server adds your rules and skills itself, so they apply in every Tempr client, and a client can't leave out a required rule. Changes reach members within a minute.

Limits

History and the audit log

Every change to a rule or skill keeps a version, with who made it and when. Open an item's history to see what changed and restore an earlier version; deleted items can be restored too. Every change is also in the organization's audit log. To keep skills in a git repository and publish them from CI, use the Management API.