Skills, Playbooks, and Knowledge: teaching Devin your codebase

Once you are past your first few sessions, the bottleneck stops being how you phrase a task and becomes how much your agent already knows. Devin used to offer three separate ways to teach it — Knowledge, Playbooks, and Skills. In 2026 Cognition is folding the first two into Skills, which makes the choice simpler.

Update, 29 October 2026: Cognition has deprecated Knowledge, and Playbooks are moving to Skills. New accounts start with Skills and no Playbooks from 24 October 2026. This guide has been rewritten to match.

Skills — the main mechanism now

Skills are SKILL.md files committed to your repositories that teach Devin reusable procedures and the context it needs to work your way. They follow the open Agent Skills standard published at agentskills.io/specification.

The recommended location is .agents/skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md, and Devin discovers them automatically across connected repositories. You can invoke one explicitly by mentioning @skills:skill-name in a prompt, or Devin can pick it up on its own. A Skill can also carry its own permission rules (allow, deny, ask) and a list of pre-approved tools.

Skills are now the place for “this is how we do things here” as well as for “here is the procedure for this job.” Because they are code, living in your repo and moving through pull requests, they get versioned and reviewed like everything else.

Plugins — distributing Skills

For the CLI, a Plugin bundles Skills — and optionally rules, custom subagents, hooks, and MCP servers — for installation from a GitHub repo, a git URL, or a local folder:

devin plugins install <source>

Plugins install at user level and are available across projects. Their Skills are invoked as /<plugin>:<skill> slash commands. The docs note that plugin hooks are best effort and fail open, so don’t rely on a hook as your only safeguard.

Playbooks — moving to Skills

Playbooks are described as “easily shareable, reusable prompts for repeated tasks” — effectively a custom system prompt scoped to one recurring job, created in the web app under Settings → Playbooks.

Cognition’s docs now say Playbooks are moving to Skills, and new accounts start with Skills and have no Playbooks from 24 October 2026. If you already have Playbooks, they keep working for now, but new recurring procedures belong in a Skill.

Knowledge — deprecated

Knowledge was a collection of tips, advice, and instructions Devin could reference across sessions, created under Settings → Resources → Knowledge. Cognition’s docs now say: “Knowledge is deprecated and will be removed in a future update.”

What that means for you:

• Don’t create new Knowledge entries. Write a Skill instead.
• Existing entries are being migrated automatically to Skills in Plugins. The rollout is gradual and needs no action from you.
• No removal date has been published, so check the Knowledge page in the docs if you depend on it.

Choosing between them

You want to encode…	Use
Conventions, context, “how we do things”	Skill
A procedure for a recurring task	Skill
A shareable bundle of Skills, rules, or hooks	Plugin
Anything you used to put in Knowledge or a Playbook	Skill

The failure mode to avoid is stuffing everything into prompts. If you are pasting the same paragraph into a third session, write it down as a Skill.

References

1. Skills — docs.devin.ai
2. Creating Playbooks — docs.devin.ai
3. Knowledge — docs.devin.ai
4. Plugins overview (CLI) — docs.devin.ai
5. Agent Skills specification — agentskills.io

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