Agent Skills

Agent skills are a lightweight, open format for extending AI agents. This open format was created by Anthropic in 2025.

Skills use progressive disclosure to manage context efficiently:

Discovery: at startup, agents load only the name and description of each available skill, just enough to know when it might be relevant.
Activation: when a task matches a skill's description, the agent reads the full SKILL.md instructions into context.
Execution: the agent follows the instructions, optionally loading referenced files or executing bundled code as needed.

Skill folder structure:

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