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Some moments need specific wording: a recording notice at the start of a call, a fraud warning when a card is reported stolen, a legal disclaimer after a transaction. Responses let you declare that text once in responses.yml and have the framework deliver it exactly as written. The LLM never rewrites it.

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Defining responses

Response text lives in the skill’s responses.yml:
skills/card_replace/responses.yml
Each name maps to a list, and the first entry is the text that gets delivered. Placeholders in braces are filled from memory at the moment the message is sent. Use {session.<skill_id>.<entry>} or {session.project.<entry>} to read any value the skill can see, or the short {entry} form for the skill’s own values. Interpolate only values you know are set by then: a placeholder with no value is left in the text as written.

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Delivering a response

Four things can fire a response, and which one you reach for depends on what the wording is tied to. On skill activation, or when a value becomes true. A frontmatter utter: trigger. This is the one that needs no ordered block:
skills/card_replace/skill.md
on: activate fires once when the skill becomes active. when: fires the first time its condition becomes true after a memory write, so a warning tied to a value lands the moment that value is recorded, wherever in the conversation that happens. Around a tool call. on_success: and on_failure: on a tool_constraints entry deliver a response after the tool runs, and requires_confirmation: names the approval question and the line for a declined one. See Tool Constraints. At a fixed point in a sequence. Ordered-block steps:
action: delivers the response and advances. utterance: on a collect: step is the question asked for that value.

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When to use a response

Reach for one when the wording is a business requirement: compliance, legal, brand-mandated disclosures. Use it when the exact words are the point. For everything else, let the LLM phrase things from your instructions. Declaring every message as a response produces an agent that sounds like a scripted phone tree, which is the thing Maestro exists to avoid. If you want declared text that still adapts to context, a response can opt into LLM rewording:
Do not set this on anything compliance-sensitive.

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Overriding built-in messages

The bundled default skills (greeting, wrap-up, resume-after-digression) ship their own responses. Every responses.yml merges into one registry keyed by name, so declaring a name in your project-root file replaces the built-in one:
responses.yml
That shared registry is also why response names are worth prefixing with the skill they belong to.

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Reference

For the merge order, both interpolation forms, and every field, see the responses.yml reference.