Mini apps for focused work
Open chat and you face a blank box. That’s the right tool when you’re thinking out loud, comparing options, or going somewhere you haven’t been before. It is the wrong tool when you already know the shape of what you want and you want it the same way every time. Describing the format from scratch on every run is busywork, and busywork is exactly what you’re here to avoid.
That’s what a mini app removes. Take GenStudio. You don’t prompt it with three paragraphs about pacing and aspect ratios. You give it a brief — product, angle, audience — and it returns a storyboarded video ad: scenes, shots, copy, and the beats in order. The structure is baked in. You fill in what’s specific to this job and skip everything that’s the same every time.
Generalize that and you have the whole category. A mini app is a task wrapped in the right inputs, producing the same kind of output on every run.
How a mini app differs from chat — and from an agent
Chat is open-ended. You steer, it follows, and the format is whatever you negotiate in the moment. Great for exploration, less great for the tenth ad this week that needs to match the previous nine.
A mini app pins down both ends. The inputs are guided, so you can’t forget the field that matters, and the output lands in a consistent format you can hand off without reformatting. Less freedom, more reliability — a fair trade when the job is repeatable.
An agent is a different animal again. An agent plans and executes multi-step work across your tools — it might pull a thread from Slack, open a GitHub PR, and update a Notion doc, deciding the steps as it goes. A mini app does one focused thing and hands the result back to you. Rule of thumb: reach for a mini app when the task is a single, well-shaped deliverable, and an agent when the work spans several steps and some judgment about what to do next.
Mini apps draw on the same foundation as the rest of Skynet. They use your unified memory and context — the documents, threads, and tickets you’ve connected — so a brief doesn’t have to re-explain your product or your audience. And where a task calls for it, a mini app can act through your connected tools rather than just reading from them.
Launching one and using it
Mini apps live in your workspace next to Chat and Agents. The flow is short on purpose — that’s the point of the format.
- Pick the app for the job. Browse the catalog and choose the one whose output matches what you need. The app’s name tells you what it makes.
- Fill in the guided inputs. Each app asks for what it actually needs — for GenStudio, the brief and the audience — and nothing it doesn’t.
- Run it. The app does its single job and returns the deliverable in its standard format. Connected memory fills in the context you’d otherwise retype.
- Review and iterate. Tweak an input and rerun, or send the result onward — into a doc, a channel, or the next stage of work — through your connected tools.
No prompt engineering, no reminding it of the format. The guardrails are the feature.
Once you notice yourself running the same shaped task on repeat, you can build a mini app of your own — describe the job once and it becomes a reusable tool with its own inputs, no code required.
Frequently asked questions
Yes. If you find yourself running the same structured task over and over, describe the job once and Skynet turns it into a reusable mini app with its own guided inputs. No code, and your whole team can run it.
They use the same unified memory and context as the rest of Skynet, so a brief already knows your product and audience. Where the task needs it, a mini app can also take action through connected tools like Slack, GitHub, and Notion — not just read from them.
A mini app does one focused thing and hands you the result in a consistent format. An agent plans and runs multi-step work across your tools, deciding the steps as it goes. Use a mini app for a single well-shaped deliverable; use an agent when the work spans several steps and needs judgment.
When the task is open-ended or one-off — exploring, comparing, or figuring out what you even want. Mini apps earn their keep on repeatable work where the output needs the same shape every time.