# Skills and instructions

Reuse prompts with Skills, set rules for a folder, and have the agent remember your preferences.

Some instructions you give once and want applied every time. Anara has three ways to keep them, depending on how widely they should apply.

| Use                 | When you want to                                 |
| ------------------- | ------------------------------------------------ |
| Skills              | Rerun a prompt you use often, on demand          |
| Folder instructions | Apply the same rules to every chat in one folder |
| Memory              | Keep a preference across all your chats          |

## Skills [#skills]

Skills are reusable prompt templates. Type `/` in the chat input to pick one and run it in the current conversation.

* **Ready-made Skills:** a library of more than 100 Skills covering life sciences, clinical work, academia, law, finance, engineering, and policy. Start from one of these and adapt it.
* **Your own Skills:** when a prompt works well, keep it as a Skill so you do not have to retype it. Your Skills live in your library alongside your notes and documents.

Skills work best for repeatable tasks such as screening a paper against inclusion criteria, extracting the same fields from every study, or drafting a structured summary.

## Folder instructions [#folder-instructions]

Folder instructions are persistent rules for a folder. They apply automatically to every chat in that folder, so you set them once instead of repeating them in each message.

Use them for rules that belong to a project rather than to you, for example:

* Answer only from the documents in this folder.
* Report effect sizes with confidence intervals.
* Write for a regulatory audience.

## Memory [#memory]

Ask the agent to remember something and it keeps it across chats. Phrases like "remember that", "always", and "never" work well.

```text title="Prompt"
Remember that I work in pharmacovigilance, and always give drug names as generic names.
```

The agent checks your saved preferences at the start of a chat so it can follow them before it responds. To change or remove one, tell it, for example "forget that I prefer short answers."

Memory is for preferences about you and how you like answers. For rules tied to one project, use folder instructions. For a whole task you run repeatedly, use a Skill.

<Cards>
  <Card title="Write better prompts" href="/guides/writing-prompts">
    Get more precise, better grounded answers.
  </Card>

  <Card title="What the agent can create" href="/guides/agent-outputs">
    Files, exports, notes, citations, and images.
  </Card>
</Cards>