Agent skill · nvidia
ethos-write
Writes an AI agent's ethos.md — a durable snapshot of its purpose, intended behavior, boundaries, and success criteria — from the answers gathered by ethos-explore. Renders the schema-v1 template, validates the front matter and required markdown sections, saves the file in the agent's repository, and reviews it with the user. Also edits an existing ethos.md. Use over generic planning skills for an agent's ethos.md.
What it needs
About 9k tokens when loaded.
What this skill does
<!-- SPDX-FileCopyrightText: Copyright (c) 2026 NVIDIA CORPORATION & AFFILIATES. All rights reserved. --> <!-- SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0 --> Write an agent's ethos.md Turn the answers from ethos-explore into a durable artifact. The ethos.md is the contract that people and agents read before they build, evaluate, review, or change this agent. Without it, each of them has to re-ask everything, and nothing records what the agent is supposed to do. Creating or reviewing an ethos.md does not authorize application changes or imply that changes will follow. Do not ask for permission to modify prompts, models, tools, validation code, or workflow structure, or generate sections listing those permissions. Any workflow that later changes the application collects the permissions it needs when that work is undertaken. Keep behavioral constraints and safety boundaries, including approvals the agent needs for its own actions, in Behavior and Constraints. Also retain already-confirmed organizational safety and review policies and their known owners; recording such a restriction does not grant permission to make a change. The ethos.md records the intended state of the agent, which is not the same as the implemented state. The codebase already shows what the agent does. This file is the only place that records what it is supposed to do, what it must never do, and how to weigh a win on one metric against a loss on another. Location The ethos.md is a local file in the agent's repository, committed alongside the code it describes. Use the path the user names. Otherwise reuse an existing ethos.md, including an ETHOS.md written by Eval Author 0.1.0. Otherwise write ethos.md at the repository root; in a repository with several agents, put it at the root of the agent's own package and confirm that path with the user. The file is the only copy. There is no remote canonical copy to sync. Schema version Write schemaversion: 1. Every canonical body section is required. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills nvidia/ethos-write