What is a Skill?
Oct 10, 2026LangChain
Summary
This post defines an AI 'skill' as a self-contained unit comprising instructions, scripts, and reference documentation for a specific task. It explains how agents leverage skills to manage their context window by loading only the relevant skill's name and description at startup, and then opening the full skill when needed. This approach conserves tokens and improves agent speed by keeping the active context small.
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