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>
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topic, source_keys
| topic | source_keys | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| agentskills-overview |
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What Agent Skills is
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.
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.
Why Agent Skills exist
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:
- Domain expertise: capture specialized knowledge — legal review processes, data pipelines, presentation formats — as reusable instructions and resources.
- Repeatable workflows: turn multi-step tasks into consistent, auditable procedures.
- Cross-product reuse: build a skill once and use it across any skills-compatible agent.
Progressive disclosure
Agents load skills in three stages:
- Discovery — at startup, agents load only the
nameanddescriptionof each available skill (~100 tokens per skill). Just enough to know when one might be relevant. - Activation — when a task matches a skill's description, the agent reads the full
SKILL.mdbody into context (<5000 tokens recommended). - Execution — the agent follows the instructions, optionally executing bundled scripts or loading referenced files on demand.
Full instructions load only when a task calls for them, so agents can keep many skills on hand with only a small context footprint.
Canonical directory
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.
File structure
skill-name/
├── SKILL.md # Required: metadata + instructions
├── scripts/ # Optional: executable code
├── references/ # Optional: documentation
├── assets/ # Optional: templates, resources
└── ... # Any additional files or directories
The SKILL.md file must contain YAML frontmatter followed by Markdown content. There are no format restrictions on the body.