What is an agent skill? How to protect your agent's context window.

This post elaborates on the concept of 'skills' within LangChain's Deep Agents harness. Skills are introduced as a mechanism to manage agent complexity and protect the context window. Each skill is a self-contained folder with instructions, scripts, references, and assets for a specific task. At startup, only the skill's name and description are loaded, preventing the system prompt from becoming overly verbose. The agent dynamically selects and loads the appropriate skill only when a task requires it, and the context associated with that skill is discarded upon task completion. This approach aims to prevent agents from getting stuck due to excessive information crammed into the context window.