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Agent Skills ​

AI generated in dialogue with humans. Not fully reviewed.

Overview ​

Agent Skills are a lightweight, open format for extending AI agent capabilities with specialized knowledge and workflows. They provide a standardized way to give AI systems like Claude access to task-specific instructions, scripts, and reference materials.

What are Agent Skills? ​

At its core, a skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md file that includes:

  • Metadata (name and description at minimum)
  • Instructions that tell an agent how to perform a specific task
  • Optional bundled scripts, templates, and reference materials

Basic Structure ​

my-skill/
├── SKILL.md          # Required: instructions + metadata
├── scripts/          # Optional: executable code
├── references/       # Optional: documentation
└── assets/           # Optional: templates, resources

How Skills Work ​

Skills use progressive disclosure to manage context efficiently:

  1. Discovery: At startup, agents load only the name and description of each available skill - just enough to know when it might be relevant.

  2. Activation: When a task matches a skill's description, the agent reads the full SKILL.md instructions into context.

  3. Execution: The agent follows the instructions, optionally loading referenced files or executing bundled code as needed.

This approach keeps agents fast while giving them access to more context on demand.

The SKILL.md File Format ​

Every skill starts with a SKILL.md file containing YAML frontmatter and Markdown instructions:

markdown
---
name: pdf-processing
description: Extract text and tables from PDF files, fill forms, merge documents.
---

# PDF Processing

## When to use this skill
Use this skill when the user needs to work with PDF files...

## How to extract text
1. Use pdfplumber for text extraction...

## How to fill forms
...

Required Frontmatter ​

  • name: A short identifier
  • description: When to use this skill

Markdown Body ​

The Markdown body contains the actual instructions and has no specific restrictions on structure or content.

Key Advantages ​

  • Self-documenting: A skill author or user can read a SKILL.md and understand what it does, making skills easy to audit and improve.

  • Extensible: Skills can range in complexity from just text instructions to executable code, assets, and templates.

  • Portable: Skills are just files, so they're easy to edit, version, and share.

Use Cases ​

Agent skills enable:

  • Task-specific workflows (e.g., PDF processing, data analysis)
  • Domain-specific knowledge (e.g., medical terminology, legal procedures)
  • Tool integrations (e.g., API interactions, database queries)
  • Code generation patterns (e.g., testing frameworks, deployment scripts)
  • Documentation and reference materials access

Implementation ​

AI systems that support agent skills can:

  • Load skill metadata at startup for discovery
  • Activate skills dynamically based on user requests
  • Execute skill instructions and bundled code
  • Access skill assets and reference materials

Resources ​

  • [[Agentic AI]] - Autonomous AI systems that can perform tasks
  • [[Prompt Engineering]] - Crafting effective instructions for AI systems
  • [[Tool Use]] - AI systems using external tools and APIs

Tags ​

#ai #agents #skills #tools #automation #standards