Agent Skills

Product summary

Agent Skills is an open format for packaging specialized knowledge, workflows, and code into portable, version-controlled skill directories that AI agents load on demand. A skill is a folder containing a required SKILL.md file (metadata + instructions in YAML frontmatter + markdown body), plus optional supporting files in scripts/, references/, and assets/ directories.

Agents load skills through progressive disclosure: at startup they load only the name and description of each skill (~50-100 tokens per skill); when a task matches a skill's description, they load the full SKILL.md body into context; if the instructions reference supporting files, those load individually as needed.

Key files and paths:

• SKILL.md — Required. Contains YAML frontmatter (name, description, optional license, compatibility, metadata, allowed-tools) followed by markdown instructions.
• scripts/ — Optional. Executable code (Python, Bash, JavaScript, etc.) that agents can run.
• references/ — Optional. Additional documentation files agents load on demand.
• assets/ — Optional. Templates, images, data files.
• Discovery paths: .agents/skills/ (cross-client standard), .<client>/skills/ (client-specific).

Primary docs: https://agentskills.io

When to use