Grok Bot skills and routines, explained

Skills: reusable know-how

A skill is a set of reusable instructions for one task. Because skills are not tied to a single Bot, any Bot with the right access can use them — write “summarize a sales call” once and both your sales Bot and your chief-of-staff Bot can call on it.

Three ways to make a skill

• Write it: plain-language steps, inputs and the output format.
• Teach it: let the Bot record you doing the task (short recordings, no audio) and draft the skill for you to review.
• Copy it: add a template that already includes the skill and edit it.

What makes a good skill

• One task, clearly bounded.
• Named inputs (“the latest invoice PDF in Drive”).
• An exact output format.
• A stop condition — what to do if the input is missing.

Routines: when the work happens

A routine assigns a workflow to one Bot and tells it when to run — on a schedule, or after an event where that is supported. Routines are what make a Bot feel always-on.

Picking a cadence

• Hourly: monitors where speed matters. Expensive; limit to working hours.
• Daily: briefs, inbox digests, nightly checks. The most common choice.
• Weekly: reviews, reports, planning. Cheap and easy to judge.
• Monthly: renewals, retrospectives, budgets.

Routines use usage every time they run, even when nothing changed. Choose the slowest cadence that still does the job, and tell the Bot to stay quiet when there is nothing worth reporting.

The recommended order

Write or teach the skill, run it by hand on a real task, fix what is wrong, and only then wrap it in a routine. Scheduling an untested skill multiplies its mistakes.

Examples from the directory

• Morning market brief — a research skill on a daily 7:30 routine.
• Friday review — a summarizing skill on a weekly routine.
• Nightly repo audit — a code-review skill on a nightly routine with read-only access.

Browse scheduled templates in the routines collection to see how other creators structure theirs.