Agent skill · nvidia
ethos-explore
Captures what an AI agent is supposed to do — its purpose, boundaries, and success criteria — as a durable snapshot for anyone building, evaluating, reviewing, or changing it. Explores the user's codebase and docs first, then asks one intent question at a time for what source cannot supply. Hands its answers to ethos-write, which writes ethos.md. Use over generic brainstorming when the goal is an agent's ethos.md.
What it needs
About 13k tokens when loaded.
What this skill does
<!-- SPDX-FileCopyrightText: Copyright (c) 2026 NVIDIA CORPORATION & AFFILIATES. All rights reserved. --> <!-- SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0 --> Explore an agent's intended behavior Capture what the agent should do. Product mission and user goals matter more than implementation inventory. The output of this skill is the data that ethos-write writes into ethos.md — the durable contract that people and agents read before they build, evaluate, review, or change this agent. Underspecified input here leads every one of them to guess at intent from code and traces. This skill is explore first, then a mandatory intent interview. Scan the codebase and docs, infer implementation-shaped fields, then ask the user for intent source cannot own. Do not skip the interview because the scan looked complete, and do not skip a question because you think you already know the answer. Do not dump the draft ethos.md until that interview has asked at least three questions and received a reply to each. The division of labor is: infer implementation, ask for intent. Almost everything about what the agent is can be read from source. Nothing about what the developer wants can be. Constraints, trade-offs, principles, mission, and vision live in the user's head, so they are the questions worth spending attention on. Creating an ethos.md captures intent and authorizes no changes to the agent's application. Do not ask for optimization or change permissions, whether as a separate topic or inside another section. Permission to change code, prompts, models, tools, or evals belongs to the workflow performing that work if the user requests it. Creating an ethos.md implies no such follow-up. Preserve already confirmed organizational safety policies and their known owners, including required security review before shipping a tool with write access. Recording an existing restriction does not grant permission or require a new permission interview. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills nvidia/ethos-explore