Agent Skills are open-standard, portable packages of instructions, scripts, and resources that equip AI agents with specialized, step-by-step workflows and domain expertise.
Originally created by Anthropic and governed at agentskills.io, skills allow general-purpose AI agents (such as GitHub Copilot in VS Code, Cursor, and Claude Code) to move from simple chat assistants to production-grade digital workers.
Agent Skills Standard
- Folder Structure: A skill is a lightweight directory containing a required
SKILL.mdmetadata file plus optional scripts, reference documents, and assets. - Progressive Disclosure: Agents use a three-stage loading mechanism—Discovery (loading only the name and description at startup), Activation (reading the full markdown instructions when relevant), and Execution (running bundled scripts or tools)—to prevent context window bloat.
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