Using AI Bot Skills

Gisia exposes machine-readable skill files that let AI bots understand and operate your projects through the API. This guide walks you through connecting a bot to a project and having it perform real DevOps tasks on your behalf.

What are Skills?

Each project exposes a set of Markdown skill files at predictable URLs:

  • /-/skill.md — project overview, authentication, and available skills
  • /-/issues/skill.md — how to list, create, update, and close issues
  • /-/epics/skill.md — how to manage epics
  • /-/labels/skill.md — how to manage labels

When you send the skill URL to a bot, it reads the file and learns how to interact with your project through the Gisia REST API.

Step 1 — Set Up Your AI Bot

You need a bot that can fetch URLs and call REST APIs. OpenClaw is a good starting point and works out of the box with Gisia skill files.

Install and start your bot following its own setup guide, then come back here once it is running.

Step 2 — Create a Project

  1. Go to /-/dashboard/projects
  2. Click New Project
  3. Enter a project name and path
  4. Click Create Project

Your new project will start empty with the repository ready to use.

Step 3 — Create a Personal Access Token

The bot needs a token to authenticate with the Gisia API and to clone or push to the repository.

  1. Go to /-/users/settings/personal_access_tokens
  2. Click New token
  3. Give it a name (e.g. my-bot)
  4. Set an expiration date
  5. Check the API scope
  6. Click Create personal access token
  7. Copy the token — you will not be able to see it again

Step 4 — Send the Skill Instruction to Your Bot

On your new project page you will see an AI Skill block. It contains a ready-made instruction you can copy and paste directly into your bot chat.

For a private project it looks like:

Read the project skill and follow the instructions by running: `curl -s https://your-instance/-/skill.md -H "PRIVATE-TOKEN: YOUR_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN"`

Replace YOUR_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN with the token you just created, then send the message to your bot.

The bot will fetch skill.md, read the authentication and endpoint instructions, and confirm it is ready to act on your project.

Step 5 — Ask the Bot to Clone and Push a README

Once the bot has read the skill, ask it to get started on the repository:

“Follow the project skill.md to clone the repository and push a README using the personal access token.”

The bot will:

  1. Clone the repository over HTTPS using your token
  2. Create a README.md file
  3. Commit and push it back to the project

You can verify the result by refreshing your project page — the README should appear in the file browser.

Step 6 — Create an Epic with Issues and Labels

Now ask the bot to organize some work:

“Create an epic called ‘Initial setup’, then create two issues under it — ‘Configure CI pipeline’ and ‘Add test coverage’. Apply the labels ‘priority::high’ and ‘workflow::todo’ to both issues.”

The bot will use the epics/skill.md and issues/skill.md skill files to:

  1. Create the epic via the Epics API
  2. Create each issue and link it to the epic using epic_id
  3. Apply the specified labels to each issue

Once done, you can view the epic and its linked issues directly in your project.