Defame1297
41c4da31cf
- Add agentskillsio/ reference docs (8 topic files, agentskills- prefix stripped) - Add agentsmd/ reference docs (4 topic files) - Add skill-write examples: skill-creator (Anthropic), writing-great-skills (mattpocock), writing-skills (obra/superpowers) with canonical sources.md files Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
49 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown
49 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown
---
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topic: agentskills-overview
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source_keys:
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- agentskills-home
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- agentskills-spec
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- agentskills-quickstart
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---
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## What Agent Skills is
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Agent Skills is a lightweight, open format for extending AI agent capabilities with specialized knowledge and workflows. A skill is a folder containing a `SKILL.md` file — metadata plus instructions that tell an agent how to perform a specific task. Skills can also bundle scripts, reference materials, templates, and other resources.
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The format was originally developed by Anthropic, released as an open standard, and has been adopted by a large and growing number of agent products: Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, OpenAI Codex, Google Gemini CLI, VS Code, Cursor, JetBrains Junie, Block Goose, OpenHands, Roo Code, Spring AI, Databricks Genie, Snowflake Cortex, and many others — 35+ confirmed implementations as of June 2026.
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## Why Agent Skills exist
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Agents are increasingly capable but often lack the context to do real work reliably. Skills solve this by packaging procedural knowledge and project-specific context into portable, version-controlled folders that agents load on demand:
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- **Domain expertise**: capture specialized knowledge — legal review processes, data pipelines, presentation formats — as reusable instructions and resources.
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- **Repeatable workflows**: turn multi-step tasks into consistent, auditable procedures.
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- **Cross-product reuse**: build a skill once and use it across any skills-compatible agent.
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## Progressive disclosure
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Agents load skills in three stages:
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1. **Discovery** — at startup, agents load only the `name` and `description` of each available skill (~100 tokens per skill). Just enough to know when one might be relevant.
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2. **Activation** — when a task matches a skill's description, the agent reads the full `SKILL.md` body into context (<5000 tokens recommended).
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3. **Execution** — the agent follows the instructions, optionally executing bundled scripts or loading referenced files on demand.
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Full instructions load only when a task calls for them, so agents can keep many skills on hand with only a small context footprint.
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## Canonical directory
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The canonical location for skills is `.agents/skills/` at the project root. Tool-specific locations (`.claude/skills/` for Claude Code, `~/.codex/skills/` for Codex) are thin adapters that map to this canonical path. Putting skills at `.agents/skills/` maximizes cross-tool portability.
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## File structure
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```
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skill-name/
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├── SKILL.md # Required: metadata + instructions
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├── scripts/ # Optional: executable code
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├── references/ # Optional: documentation
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├── assets/ # Optional: templates, resources
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└── ... # Any additional files or directories
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```
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The `SKILL.md` file must contain YAML frontmatter followed by Markdown content. There are no format restrictions on the body.
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