Most talk about getting Genie right is about the data. The tables you expose, the metric views, the joins, the column descriptions. That work matters, and it is the foundation on which everything else sits. There is a second kind of curation that gets far less attention. You can now tell Genie how your team works in plain written English, and it carries that into its answers.
We can achieve these using two levers, and they are worth keeping apart in your head because they behave differently. One is shared and set by an admin. One is private and built by each person. They do not stack, and neither one inherits from the other. You set each one on purpose. Both are generally available (GA) today.
What does the shared instructions file do?
The first lever is a single file. An admin creates it at /Workspace/.genie_workspace_instructions.md, and it applies to everyone using chat in that workspace. The limit is 20,000 characters, which is more room than most teams will need.
What belongs in it: your data conventions, the terms your business uses and what they mean, and how you want answers shaped. If revenue means net revenue by default, if a region maps to a specific set of countries, and if you want short answers with the query shown, you say so once in this file for everybody. Write it once, so everyone doesn't have to re-explain the same convention in every chat.
A good response guideline is concrete. Answer in one short paragraph and then show the SQL. Round currency to whole numbers. State the date range you used. Small rules like these shape every answer in the workspace, and you write them one time.
One edge to know up front, because it is easy to assume otherwise. This file applies to chat only. It does not reach Genie Agents, and it does not reach Genie Code. Those surfaces carry their own curation. A careful instructions file will not govern an Agent.
What are personal skills?
The second lever is personal. A skill is a small repeatable task you teach Genie by asking for it in natural language. Genie saves it to your own workspace user folder, and from then on, it loads automatically when it deems the task relevant. You can also call it directly by typing / and then its name.
A skill earns its keep on the thing you do the same way each week. The weekly report, the way you frame it, the check you run before a review, and the format you want a certain answer in. You describe it once and stop re-typing it. Because a well-named skill with a clear description loads on its own when Genie judges it relevant, the right one shows up at the right moment without you reaching for it.
Two facts about skills matter more than the mechanics. They are private to you and shared with no one else. There is no team library of skills today. What one person builds stays with that person.
Where do the two levers meet a governance question?
Put the two side by side, and a gap shows up.
The instructions file is visible and governable. It is a normal file in the workspace, so an admin owns it; you can read its history and review it like any other versioned artifact. Chat activity on top of it is captured too. Genie chat events are written to the audit log system table, in Public Preview, covering who asked what, how a conversation was steered, and when a chat was shared. For a regulated team that trails matters, because you can show who asked what and when, straight from a system table you already query.
Skills sit differently. They are private by design; they live in each user's own folder; and today, an admin has no visibility into the skills people have built. There is no published audit event for creating one. For a personal shortcut, that is the right call. The risk shows up when a personal shortcut turns into something a team leans on.
Picture two analysts who each built a skill to calculate the same metric, and the two skills define it a little differently. Both people trust their own answer. Nobody can see that the two disagree, because neither skill is visible to anyone else. That is how a private convenience becomes a quiet source of drift.
A few practices keep the productivity and close the gap:
Name an owner: Give the workspace instructions file one owner and a review date, the same way you treat a shared query or a dashboard definition.
Put logic in its right home: Correctness belongs in a metric view or the semantic layer, a shared convention belongs in the instructions file, and a personal shortcut belongs in a skill. Feeling tempted to encode a business rule inside a private skill is the signal to move it somewhere shared.
Promote before you depend: The moment more than one person needs what a skill does, lift that logic into a governed, shared place and stop relying on the private copy.
Keep the file lean: Short and factual reads better than long and clever. Write conventions and terminology, and leave the heavy business logic downstream where it belongs.
Remember the scope: The instructions file covers chat only, so plan separate curation for Genie Agents and Genie Code rather than assuming one file covers all three.
What good looks like:
The workspace file reads like a short style guide rather than a rulebook of business logic.
Correctness lives in metric views, conventions live in the file, and shortcuts live in skills.
No answer a team depends on is trapped inside one person's private skill.
Someone owns the file, and it gets reviewed on a schedule.
There is a third lever worth mentioning. Personal memory, still in preview, lets Genie remember facts you give it across chats. It has the same private-to-you shape as skills, so the same governance question applies.
For more discussion on getting Genie ready for real use 🧞👇🏻
Feel free to connect with me directly or drop a DM: linkedin.com/in/lingeshwarankanniappan
Sources
Genie One chat, workspace instructions, and user skills: https://docs.databricks.com/aws/en/genie-one/chat
Genie chat audit log events: https://docs.databricks.com/aws/en/admin/account-settings/audit-logs