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Custom Skills

NEX supports Custom Skills, allowing you to extend the assistant's capabilities with specialized knowledge, supplementary resources, and executable scripts tailored to your specific hardware design and verification workflows.

What is a Skill?

A skill provides NEX with a bundle of domain-specific instructions and tools. Typical components include:

  • Detailed Instructions: Step-by-step guidance on how to perform a specialized task or workflow.
  • Resources: Supplementary files such as documentation, schemas, templates, or golden reference files.
  • Scripts: Executable programs (e.g., Python or Bash scripts) that perform automated actions, data processing, or external API calls.

When NEX encounters a task relevant to a skill, it loads these resources to ensure its execution is grounded in your exact requirements.

Creating a Skill

A skill is defined by a SKILL.md file. It must begin with YAML frontmatter to be discoverable by NEX and properly displayed in the /help UI or for autonomous skill selection.

SKILL.md
---
name: my-custom-skill
description: Describe what this skill does and when NEX should use it.
---

# Instructions
Provide detailed steps on how NEX should utilize this skill.
You can reference attached scripts and resources here.

File Placement

Just like NEX.md, skills can be scoped locally or globally:

  • Workspace Skills: Place your SKILL.md in ./skills/<name>/SKILL.md within your project repository. This ensures the skill is tracked as project collateral and shared with your team.
  • Global Skills: Place your SKILL.md in ~/.nex/skills/<name>/SKILL.md for personal skills you want available across all your hardware projects.

Adding Scripts and Resources

If your skill requires executable scripts, place them in a scripts/ directory next to the SKILL.md file.

Script Arguments

Scripts must be designed to parse standard command-line flags (e.g., --width 8), as NEX will invoke them using named flags rather than JSON payloads.

Make sure your scripts have the appropriate file extensions (e.g., .py, .sh) or a shebang with the executable bit set, so NEX can discover and execute them properly.