Agent Skills Overview - Agent Skills
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What are Agent Skills?

Agent Skills are a lightweight, open format for extending AI agent capabilities with specialized knowledge and workflows. At its core, a skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md file. This file includes metadata (name and description, at minimum) and instructions that tell an agent how to perform a specific task. Skills can also bundle scripts, reference materials, templates, and other resources. 
my-skill/
├── SKILL.md          # Required: metadata + instructions
├── scripts/          # Optional: executable code
├── references/       # Optional: documentation
├── assets/           # Optional: templates, resources
└── ...               # Any additional files or directories

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Why Agent Skills?

Agents are increasingly capable, but often don’t have the context they need to do real work reliably. Skills solve this by packaging procedural knowledge and company-, team-, and user-specific context into portable, version-controlled folders that agents load on demand. This gives agents:
  • Domain expertise: Capture specialized knowledge — from legal review processes to data analysis pipelines to presentation formatting — 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.

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How do Agent Skills work?

Agents load skills through progressive disclosure, in three stages:
  1. Discovery: At startup, agents load only the name and description of each available skill, just enough to know when it might be relevant.
  2. Activation: When a task matches a skill’s description, the agent reads the full SKILL.md instructions into context.
  3. Execution: The agent follows the instructions, optionally executing bundled code or loading referenced files as needed.
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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Where can I use Agent Skills?

Agent Skills are supported by a large number of AI tools and agentic clients — see the Client Showcase to explore some of them!

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Open development

The Agent Skills format was originally developed by Anthropic, released as an open standard, and has been adopted by a growing number of agent products. The standard is open to contributions from the broader ecosystem. Come join the discussion on GitHub or Discord!

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Get started with Agent Skills

Quickstart

Create your first Agent Skill and see it in action.

Specification

The complete format specification for Agent Skills.