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The fastest way to make the agent work the way you work is to write down what’s true about your environment and how you want things done. Rumus exposes two complementary tools for that:
  • Rules — short, always-on guidance the agent reads with every prompt.
  • Skills — named, on-demand procedures the agent invokes when relevant.
Both are managed at Settings → AI → Rules & Skills.

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Rules

A rule is a short bit of plain text that the agent treats as part of its system prompt. Use rules for facts and preferences that should apply every time:
  • “Use pnpm not npm in this repo.”
  • “Never run destructive commands without confirming, even if whitelisted.”
  • “All production hosts are in us-east; us-west hosts are staging.”
  • “Default to writing tests in Vitest, not Jest.”

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Add a rule

1

Open the page

Settings → AI → Rules & Skills → Rules tab.
2

Click New rule

A short text editor opens. Type the rule.
3

Toggle enabled and save

Each rule has an Enabled toggle so you can disable a rule without deleting it. Save.
The rule applies to every new agent message from that point on. Existing in-flight tool calls aren’t affected.

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Tips for writing good rules

  • Be specific. “Be careful with prod” doesn’t help. “Never run rm -rf against any host whose name contains prod” does.
  • Frame as facts when possible. Rules that describe how things are generalize better than rules that describe what to do.
  • Keep them short. Rules that bloat into paragraphs become noise; the agent ignores them. A few crisp lines beats a wall of text.
  • Audit regularly. When a rule no longer reflects your environment, disable or delete it.

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Skills

A skill is a named, self-contained procedure. Each skill has:
  • A name (e.g. deploy-staging).
  • A description of when to use it.
  • An instruction body — the actual step-by-step procedure, in your words.
Unlike rules, skills aren’t always-on. The agent reads the list of available skills with each prompt, but only invokes a skill when its description matches what you’ve asked for. That keeps the per-message context lean even with dozens of skills.

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When to write a skill

If you’re repeatedly explaining the same multi-step procedure to the agent — turn it into a skill. Common candidates:
  • Deployments — “deploy the staging environment”, “promote staging to production”.
  • Health checks — “check whether the queue worker is healthy on prod-worker-*”.
  • Diagnostic flows — “investigate a 502 on the API: check logs, then upstream, then load balancer”.
  • Code conventions — “set up a new feature module: scaffold, register in router, add tests”.

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Add a skill

1

Open the page

Settings → AI → Rules & Skills → Skills tab.
2

Click New skill

Fill in:
  • Name — short, identifier-like (deploy-staging).
  • Description — one sentence describing when the agent should use it.
  • Instruction — the actual procedure, written as steps.
3

Toggle enabled and save

Toggleable just like rules. Save.

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Writing the instruction body

Pretend you’re writing a runbook for a colleague: 
1. SSH into the bastion.
2. Run `kubectl --context=staging apply -f manifests/`.
3. Verify pod rollout with `kubectl --context=staging rollout status deploy/api`.
4. Hit the staging health endpoint and confirm 200.
5. Post in #staging-deploys with the result.
The agent treats this as the source of truth for that procedure. When a prompt would invoke this skill, the agent walks the steps, using its tools to actually do them.

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How rules and skills sync

Both rules and skills are part of your AI settings, which sync to the cloud as part of config sync. Edit a skill on your laptop and it shows up on your desktop after the next sync. They’re not part of the vault — they’re treated as configuration, not credentials, since they’re guidance text rather than secrets. Don’t put credentials in a rule or skill; reference saved keychains and accounts instead.

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Soft delete

Deleting a rule or skill is a tombstone — it’s marked deleted and synced as such, so deletion propagates across your devices. If you accidentally delete one, restore it from local sync state before the next push.

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Tips

  • One responsibility per skill. Resist the temptation to write do-everything-deploy skills; small composable skills are easier for the agent to chain.
  • Name skills to read like verbs. deploy-staging reads naturally in a prompt; staging-deployment-procedure doesn’t.
  • Use rules for facts, skills for procedures. “prod-* hosts run Ubuntu 22.04” is a rule. “How to roll a kernel upgrade on prod-*” is a skill.
  • Audit your skills when you change tools. A skill that references the old build system is technical debt the agent will faithfully use.

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Next steps

Plan mode

Plans frequently invoke skills as individual steps.

Conversation management

Auto-naming, summarization, and task lists.