Skills
How the coa skill gets installed, and how template projects teach an agent the rules of a format.
A skill is what teaches an agent the flags, the presets, and the project layout. Without one the agent has to infer the conventions; with one it starts knowing them.
Installing the coa skill
A menu item in the desktop app installs the coa skill for Claude Code, so your
agent knows the CLI before you ask it for anything.
Skills that ship with templates
Template projects seed their own skills automatically. Install the
studio-effects template and the agent learns that template's documented looks
along with it, which is why starting from a template beats starting from an empty
stage.
Each template's skill covers that format's rules, so an agent working in a changelog template and one working in a product demo behave differently without you having to explain the difference.
Why this instead of an API
Coding agents are good at one loop: read, edit, run a command, check the result. A CoAnimator project is built for that loop. Everything the agent touches is an ordinary project file, and the editor hot-reloads each edit onto the stage before the agent's next turn. A skill slots into that loop, so the agent works the way it normally does.
See Agents and skills for which agents load them.