How agents load skills

An employee’s AI client finds and reads skills with two MCP tools, list_skills and retrieve_skill, served on https://wf-api.merge.dev/mcp. There is nothing to install. A newly published skill is retrievable on the next call.

Both tools are served only after Merge enables skill retrieval for your org.

Retrieval steps

list_skills returns the skills available to the caller: slug, name, description, and referenced Connectors
retrieve_skill with a slug returns the full SKILL.md and a manifest of bundled files
retrieve_skill with a slug and a path from the manifest returns one bundled file

list_skills

Returns skills published to the org, to the caller’s Groups, the caller’s personal skills, and Merge-provided skills you enabled. See Who a skill reaches.

Parameter	Required	Description
`keyword`	No	Filters by name or description. Skill bodies are not searched.

retrieve_skill

Parameter	Required	Description
`skill`	Yes	The skill’s slug, from `list_skills`
`path`	No	A bundled file path from the manifest

{
  "skill": {
    "slug": "expense-report-review",
    "name": "Expense report review",
    "version": 3,
    "skill_md": "# Expense report review\n\n## Steps\n\n1. Pull the report with `expensify__get_report`...",
    "manifest": ["SKILL.md", "references/te-policy.md", "examples/rejection-message.md"],
    "referenced_connectors": ["expensify", "slack"]
  }
}

It always serves the currently published version. Drafts and in-review revisions are never served.
A slug the caller can’t reach, or a path not in the manifest, returns not found.
Binary files come back base64-encoded, as indicated by encoding.

Retrieval auditing

Every retrieve_skill call writes a SKILL_RETRIEVED event to the Audit trail, attributed to the employee. Each skill’s detail drawer shows a retrieval count.