Agent Skills

Most people spend their time improving prompts. I've found it's often more valuable to improve the context the AI has before it starts. That's what a Skill is.

A Skill is a reusable set of instructions in a plain text file called SKILL.md. It teaches the AI how you want a recurring task done: your voice, your brand, a piece of domain expertise. You write it once, and from then on the agent loads it automatically whenever a task matches, so you're not copy-pasting the same prompt every time.

For example, atGadient we have a skill called /gradient-brand that tells the AI where our logo lives, what hex codes to use, and what styles we like and don't. This gives the AI instructions that we can invoke while we work without copy-paste, so the output stays consistent.

Each skill starts with a brief description at the top ("metadata") that the AI tool uses to decide what it does and when to use it. The rest of the skill text only loads once the AI decides to use the skill. The technical name for that is progressive disclosure.

Make a Skill the moment you notice you're re-explaining the same workflow, the same style, or the same rules more than once. It shines on anything repetitive where consistency matters. Skip it for a genuine one-off, since the payoff comes from reuse. Easiest way to start: ask your agent's built-in skill-creator to build one for you, often by looking at a few examples of your past work.