Automation & extending
Skills & plugins
A skill is a focused, self-contained capability: instructions, tools, and reference material for one job. Skills are why Baby Whale's office output looks considered instead of generic.
Built-in skills
Seven knowledge-work skills ship with the Coworker mode preset. You'll see them invoked
in the chat as Skill · name rows:
| Skill | What it does |
|---|---|
excel-analysis | Reads and reasons about spreadsheets — structure, formulas, data quality. |
powerpoint-deck | Designs and builds decks: layouts, KPI slides, native charts, speaker notes. |
document-report | Produces structured Word documents — covers, tables, callouts. |
office-design-system | Keeps multi-file packs consistent: one palette, shared formatting rules across xlsx, pptx, and docx. |
data-cleaning | Normalizes messy sources — formats, duplicates, types — before analysis. |
research-report | Gathers and organizes material into an evidence-backed report. |
pdf-processing | Handles PDFs: reading, generating, and combining documents. |
Skills grow with releases — the app's list is the live source of truth.
Managing skills
Open Settings → Skills. Every skill can be enabled or disabled independently; a disabled skill's behavior and chat affordances disappear with it. Turn off what a workspace doesn't need — it sharpens the session and saves context.
Everything is a plugin
Skills are one kind of plugin. Baby Whale runs on DeepSeek Harness, where tools, UI sections, and even presets are plugins on the Cordis runtime. That's why disabled skills vanish cleanly instead of leaving dead menus: the UI is composed from what's actually running.
- Community plugins are discoverable via the
dsh-plugintopic on GitHub. - The harness treats nothing as built-in privilege — the same extension surface the Coworker mode preset uses is available to your own plugins.
Read a skill's source. Skills are
plain files in the repository (under the harness's skills config). Reading one
is the fastest way to learn how to write your own.