Skills in Oliver: Borrowing Version Control for Agent Instructions
On Below the Waterline, Connor Callahan and Lee Mikles dig into why agent instructions should outlast a single chat, and why Oliver borrows from version control to share them across a team.
A version history
A skill as a versioned file
One diagram, five steps, drawn the way a code history is drawn. Scroll at your own pace; move back to revisit a step.
01 / The problem
Know-how stays in one chat
Each session starts from the agent's general knowledge, so it works out the same job again. Ask for the same deck in ten chats and the results differ, and whatever you corrected stays in that one conversation.
Three chats, three starts from zero. 02 / A durable file
Write the instructions down
A skill is a plain Markdown file of instructions, with templates, examples or scripts attached when they help. Once a job comes out right, Oliver can turn that work into a skill that later requests follow.
The corrections become version 1 of a skill. 03 / Sharing
Followers track the owner
A shared skill currently goes to the whole team. Each teammate's Oliver runs the owner's latest version, with no files to download or upload.
Teammates follow the owner's line. 04 / Branching
An edit becomes its own version
When a teammate changes a shared skill, the change becomes their own version. The owner's version stays the same for everyone else.
The edit lives on the teammate's branch. 05 / Review
Owner review, then merge
The teammate can suggest the edit back. The owner reviews it and accepts or declines; on accept, every follower runs the new version. Every version is kept, and the owner can restore any one.
Accepted changes reach every follower. Old versions stay restorable.
Anyone can mark up a copy. The owner decides what goes in.
Every session with an AI agent starts from the model's general knowledge and whatever tools you've connected. Ask it for the same pitch deck in ten new chats and you may get ten slightly different decks, each needing the same corrections. On the latest Below the Waterline livestream, Connor Callahan walks Keel3's Lee Mikles through how we approached that problem in Oliver, and why the part we found most interesting was getting a whole team to share what one agent learns.
Watch the 31-minute stream above for the live build in Oliver.
Instructions that outlast a chat
Connor frames it with a plumber who knows plumbing in general and arrives with a full truck, yet still spends the first hour learning your house. The agent is the plumber, its tools and connectors are the truck, and the missing piece is a binder that says how this job gets done here.
In Oliver that binder is a skill: a plain Markdown file of instructions, with templates, examples or scripts attached when they help. We usually do a job once with Oliver, correct it until it's right, and then have Oliver turn that work into a skill. Oliver can also notice a job that keeps coming up and offer to draft one.
The interesting part is the team
Skills already exist in Claude and ChatGPT. We were more interested in what happens once a skill is good. A colleague who wants it has to download the files, upload them into their own account and adapt them. If they improve it, the files travel back the same way, and the improvement tends to stay with whoever made it. In an organization where everyone uses different agents, Connor said on the stream, that collaboration piece turned out to be highly important.
Borrowing from version control
Software teams already work this way in a shared codebase, so we took version control as the model and built our own branching mechanism into Oliver's database.
An owner shares a skill, and every teammate's Oliver follows the owner's latest version. A teammate who edits it gets a version of their own, while the owner's version stays the same for everyone else. The teammate can suggest the edit back. The owner reviews it and accepts or declines, and on accept every follower runs the new version. Every version is kept, so the owner can restore any one. In Connor's words, it keeps progress moving "as a team rather than as an individual."
Choices that shape it
A few decisions shape how this works in Oliver today:
- One owner per skill. Anyone can mark up a copy, and the owner decides what goes in. As Lee pointed out, whoever owns a standard, such as required language in a work product, can hold it in a skill.
- Opting out is personal. A teammate can turn off a shared skill without changing it for anyone else.
- Suggestions don't pile up. Declined suggestions stay declined, and unanswered ones expire after 30 days unless the pattern returns.
- Sharing currently goes to the whole team.
On the stream
Connor builds a skill live from a sample deck: one that turns any livestream topic into a deck with the same design. Lee asks how Oliver separates the fixed parts of a skill from the parts that change, and the first test run, on Shadows, comes back close but not yet in Connor's format. His takeaway is that a skill takes some refinement the first time. After that, the request shrinks to asking Oliver to go do it.
Watch the full livestream on YouTube.
Sources: the October 16, 2026 video, Below the Waterline: Skills in Oliver with Connor from Keel3, and the accompanying deck, Oliver Skills.