Every time you start a new project on Replit, you've had to re-explain yourself. Use TypeScript strict mode. Don't commit secrets. Follow our design system. It's the kind of repeated friction that quietly eats hours. Replit's new Agent Customization , shipping now as Custom Instructions and Skills , is a direct fix for that problem.

Two tools, one goal: stop re-teaching your agent

The launch bundles two distinct features that solve different parts of the same problem.

• Custom Instructions are always-on rules that get injected into the agent's context before every session, on every project in your workspace. Write them once, and the agent applies them automatically , no prompting required.
• Skills are context-aware playbooks that only activate when relevant. A design-system skill fires when someone's building UI. A security-review skill fires when someone's touching auth flows. The rest of the time, they stay out of the way.

Custom Instructions live in Workspace Settings → Customization and are available to Pro and Enterprise users. Skills, on the other hand, are available on all plans including Core.

What a skill actually is

A skill is a reusable set of instructions you write once that the agent applies whenever it's relevant , think of it like a one-page guide you'd hand a new engineer before they started a specific kind of task. The agent reads it before it works, and follows it.

Skills are a plain text file you can open in any editor, store in version control alongside your code, and share with your team , meaning skills you write for Replit are portable and yours.