Build Agent Skills and Rules | Organizing Your Development Process in Brazil

[kristymerriam]

Build Agent Skills and Rules: Organizing Your Development Process in Brazil

In the latest Developer Passport Brazil episode, we explored some powerful new capabilities in Build Agent that are coming with the Brazil release. If you watched the stream with Andrew Vitollo, our Build Agent PM, you saw a hands-on look at features designed to help you manage how AI-assisted development works on your ServiceNow platform. Here's what you need to know.

Quick Navigation

• What Are Skills and Rules?
• Custom Rules for Organizational Standards
• Custom Skills to Extend Build Agent
• Other New Capabilities in Brazil
• What's Next for Build Agent

What Are Skills and Rules?

Build Agent just added two new organizational features: Skills and Rules. While they sound similar, they serve different purposes in how Build Agent approaches your development work.

Rules are organizational guardrails. They persist across every session and represent standards your team wants Build Agent to follow automatically, without you having to repeat context every time. Rules are perfect for:

• Enforcing naming conventions across your platform
• Defining approved development patterns for your organization
• Setting governance constraints (like where Build Agent can write code)
• Documenting risk tolerance and security requirements

Rules work best for developers, security teams, governance teams, and engineering leadership who need consistent, automatic adherence to organizational standards.

Custom Rules for Organizational Standards

Think of rules as a way to bake organizational wisdom directly into how Build Agent works. Instead of telling Build Agent "we follow naming convention X" every time you chat, you create a rule once and it applies to every session.

Common use cases for rules include:

• Platform conventions: ServiceNow table naming, field naming, or API patterns you want Build Agent to follow
• Security constraints: Approved zones where Build Agent can create or modify code (global apps vs. scoped apps, for example)
• Governance: Requirements like "all new tables must include audit fields" or "all business rules need comment blocks"
• Team standards: Agreed-upon development approaches that every team member (including Build Agent) should follow

In the stream, we saw Andrew demonstrate how rules help Build Agent understand your organization's boundaries like knowing whether it should write to global apps or scoped applications, and what documentation standards need to be in place.

↑ Return to Table of Contents

Custom Skills to Extend Build Agent

Skills are different from rules. Skills are reusable capabilities you can teach Build Agent to perform on behalf of your organization. They're session-specific (you invoke them when you need them) and they're designed to augment what Build Agent can do.

Skills give you the ability to say, "Here's a specific thing we want Build Agent to be able to do." Some examples:

• Explain My App: A skill that helps Build Agent understand and document your custom application logic
• Code Review: A skill that makes Build Agent check code against your team's standards before deployment
• Custom Validations: Organization-specific checks that Build Agent should run on any generated code
• Integration Patterns: Teaching Build Agent how your organization integrates with third-party systems

The beauty of skills is that they're modular. You can create a library of reusable skills for your organization and share them across your development teams. In the stream, Andrew mentioned that ServiceNow is preparing a prepackaged library of skills to help you get started, and there's even talk of making some of these available as Hacktoberfest contributions on GitHub!

↑ Return to Table of Contents

Other New Capabilities in Brazil

While skills and rules were the headliners, the Brazil release brings several other improvements to Build Agent:

Run Script Command

Build Agent can now run scripts directly on your instance during a conversation. This means you can ask Build Agent to execute background scripts or retrieve instance-specific information without leaving the chat. In the stream, we saw Andrew use this to pull all the update sets related to Build Agent and check what tables were affected. It's a powerful way to give Build Agent real-time visibility into your environment.

Model Selection

You now have the ability to select which AI model Build Agent uses. This gives you flexibility in balancing speed, cost, and capability depending on the task at hand. Different models can be better suited to different types of development work.

Playbook Generation

Build Agent can now generate playbooks directly. Since playbooks are a key orchestration layer on top of flows, this significantly expands what Build Agent can automate for you, from simple flows all the way to complex business process orchestrations.

↑ Return to Table of Contents

What's Next for Build Agent

In the stream, Andrew shared some exciting forward-looking themes (subject to change, of course). Here's where the team is focusing energy for the second half of the year and beyond:

• Test Agent: Major investment in automated testing. This is a key differentiator since many customers don't have dedicated test teams.
• Delegated Development: Support for development architectures that don't require admin-level access, making Build Agent more accessible in strict security environments.
• Sandbox Support: Continued expansion of sandbox capabilities to reduce blast radius for sub-production apps.
• Studio Improvements: Enhanced personalization and tailoring of the Build Agent experience.
• Update Set Management: Better tools for managing, reviewing, and deploying update sets created by Build Agent.
• Autonomous Engineer: A new standalone product launching alongside Build Agent. If you have BuildAgent or ServiceNow Otto for Creator, know that Autonomous Engineer is separate though many customers will likely use both in the same environment.

Looking even further out to 2027, Andrew outlined ambitions for broader app coverage, knowing what changes will break, enhanced multi-agent workflows, and even tighter integration with Moveworks and other ServiceNow products.

↑ Return to Table of Contents

Get Involved

Have feedback on Build Agent? Questions about skills and rules? Want to contribute a skill to the prepackaged library? Leave a comment on this post. You can also reach out directly on LinkedIn or email; the Build Agent team is actively listening and iterating based on your real-world usage.

And if you're not already prepared to try this out, remember: all of these features are available on PDIs with Build Agent when Brazil is released. No waiting for production to experiment and provide feedback.

Thanks to Andrew Vitollo for joining us on Developer Passport Brazil to dive deep into Build Agent. We're excited to see what you build!