Techne — governed skills

Every finished session contains something your team paid for once and shouldn’t pay for again: the procedure that actually worked. Techne (τέχνη — “skill, craft”) turns that experience into governed, reusable skills — with the same discipline Chronos applies to everything else: nothing ships silently, everything is signed, scoped and audited.

The loop

1. Distill — on a finished session (or from the nudge after a green merge), the developer clicks ✨ Distill skill. Chronos runs the agent read-only over the session’s transcript and produces a SKILL.md candidate: a name, a one-line “use when …” trigger, keywords, and a generalized, step-by-step procedure. This is always explicit and user-triggered — there is no automatic background learning.
2. Review — the candidate lands in the enterprise panel’s Skills tab as a proposal. An admin reads it, edits it if needed, and approves it with a scope (global or a specific team) — or rejects it. The proposer never chooses how far a skill cascades.
3. Publish — approval publishes the skill as governed context (kind: skill), signed by the panel and delivered through the same global → team cascade as company prompts and connected tools.
4. Materialize — every new session in scope gets the skill in its managed context layer: rendered from the frontmatter (name + “use when” + procedure), highest precedence, never committed to the repository.
5. Invoke — published skills also appear in the composer’s / menu and the ⌘K palette under Skills, next to the built-in super workflows. Launching one enqueues the verified procedure as the prompt — on the current session or a fresh one.

The SKILL.md format

A skill is a small markdown document with a key: value frontmatter:

---
name: Cut a release
description: Use when preparing a tagged release.
triggers: release, tag, publish
---
# Cut a release

## Procedure
1. Bump the version.
2. Run the CI gate.

## Verification
The tag builds green.

The distilling agent generalizes: repo-specific paths and names become placeholders, and secrets, credentials and internal URLs are excluded (the transcript is redacted before it is ever digested). If a session holds no generalizable procedure, the distillation says so instead of inventing one.

Governance guarantees

• Never silent. Distillation is a button, not a background process. A proposal is inert until a human approves it — exactly like a code change.
• Signature first. Sessions and the palette only ever see skills that arrived in a bundle whose Ed25519 signature verified. A tampered bundle hides the skills and is audited; launching a skill re-fetches and re-verifies server-side.
• Team boundaries. A team-scoped skill never lists, materializes or launches for another team.
• Audited end to end. skill_propose, skill_approve, skill_publish in the panel; the proposal and every launch in the daemon’s audit — always metadata, never the body.
• Never committed. Like all governed context, skills materialize at runtime into the managed layer, outside the worktree.

Scopes

V1 publishes skills at global or team scope (the same cascade as the rest of the governed context). Workspace-scoped skills are a natural follow-up once the panel models workspaces.