Equipping agents for the real world with Agent Skills

This post introduces 'Agent Skills' as a new mechanism for equipping AI agents with domain-specific expertise. Agent Skills are organized folders of instructions, scripts, and resources that agents can discover and load dynamically. The core of a skill is a SKILL.md file with YAML frontmatter for metadata and progressive disclosure of information. Skills can bundle additional files for more detailed context and can include executable code for deterministic operations. The post details the structure of skills, the progressive disclosure principle, and provides best practices for authoring and testing them, including security considerations. It also highlights the integration with existing agent capabilities like filesystem access and code execution, and its support across various Anthropic platforms.