Agent Skills

folders of instructions/resources agents can discover and use
give team-specific context that can be loaded on demand
enables
- domain expertise - specialized knowledge as reusable instructions
- give new capabilities, e.g. analyzing datasets, creating presentations
- turn multi-step tasks into consistent, repeatable workflows
- reuse the same skill across different agents

spec

skill-name/SKILL.md
requires frontmatter
- name
- description
  - describe what skill does and when to use it, for agent consumption - body. entire file gets loaded, can split content into referenced files (use relative path) - keep under 500 lines - step by step instructions - input/output examples - common edge cases
scripts/
- runnable executable code
- should be self-contained
- helpful error messages
- handle edge cases gracefully
references/
- additional documentation to read when needed - loaded on demand - keep small
  - REFERENCE.md
  - FORMS.md - structured data formats
  - domain specific (finance.md)
assets/
- static resources

filesystem-based agents:
- operate in a computer env
- activated when models issue shell commands like cat /SKILL.md
tool-based
- implement tools to allow models to trigger skills
A skills-compatible agent must
- discover skills
- load metadata
- match tasks to skills
- activate skills
- execute scripts as needed