- 1. What is a skill?
- 2. What is a routine?
- 3. When do you promote a skill to a routine?
- 4. Questions people ask
What is a skill?
A skill is a reusable set of instructions for how to do a task.
Type / for a skill. Teach a task can draft a skill from a browser demonstration up to ten minutes. Audio is not recorded. Treat that draft as a happy path. Write the failure cases yourself. Skills cannot be attached at Bot create time on the format this directory uses.
What is a routine?
A routine tells one Bot when to run a workflow—on a schedule or, where supported, after an event.
A routine is owned by one Bot. There is no documented cap on a team as a whole, so this directory does not invent one. The published caps are 50 routines per Bot and 20 stored runs each. Type @ for Bots, groups, routines, and connectors.
A test run performs real work. Keep writes behind approval until you have watched it twice. Deleting a routine has no undo. Deleting a Bot removes the routines it owned. Files on the shared computer can remain.
When do you promote a skill to a routine?
- Run one real task with a safe scope.
- Correct the result until it is reviewable.
- Save the successful process as a skill.
- Test it on a second input.
- Create a routine only when retries and failure cases are defined.
- Keep consequential external actions behind approval.
That list is the close of xAI's use-cases page, read on 24 August 2026. The installers on this directory follow it. They ping the owner Bot and wait for your confirm card.
Questions people ask
Can one routine belong to a whole team?
No. A routine has one owner Bot. A group chat can talk about the result. The schedule still belongs to one teammate. See Grok Bot group chat.
What happens to old runs?
xAI documents 20 stored runs per routine. Treat anything older as gone. If you need a longer archive, copy the useful runs into a note you own.
Should a routine send mail on the first night?
No. The first nights should stop at a review list. Add send only after you have watched the draft twice and turned the approval on with your eyes open.
Related: What is Grok Bot?, Create a Grok Bot, Write a profile.
Verified on 2026-08-24 against docs.x.ai/grok-bot/skills-routines-and-automations, docs.x.ai/grok-bot/use-cases. Recheck the live pages before you change a plan or a vendor.
