Skills

A skill is a folder that teaches an agent how to do a specific task the same way every time. At the center is a SKILL.md file: a short name and description up top, then step-by-step instructions and any scripts or examples the task needs. Drop it into an agent that supports skills and it picks the skill up and follows it whenever a matching task comes along. Where a prompt is a one-off you type, a skill sticks around as a reusable capability. The Taste Skill entry in this guide is a real one, design rules that stop coding agents from shipping generic UIs.

The clever bit is progressive disclosure. The agent keeps only each skill's name and description in mind, then loads the full instructions when a task matches, so you can give it a big library without burying it in context. Anthropic published the format as an open standard in late 2025, and skills now ship from the likes of Notion, Canva, Cloudflare, and Figma.

Skills earn their keep when you catch yourself explaining the same thing to an AI over and over: your formatting rules, or the exact way you like a report built. Package it once and every future run starts from that instead of your memory.

If you're not building anything, the takeaway is smaller. When someone shares a SKILL.md, it's a portable recipe you can drop into your own agent to get the same behavior, and the library of good ones is growing fast.