Agent Skills Standard#

A standardized way to equip AI Agents with new capabilities and domain expertise. Adopted by 35+ Agent products.

Use Cases#

Use when creating new skills, validating skill formats, optimizing existing skills, or learning about standardized skill system design.

Reference File Routing#

NeedReadQuick skill creation (5-step guide)quick-start.mdSKILL.md format spec + Agent integrationspec.mdAuthoring best practices + quality eval + description optimizationauthoring.mdCommon anti-patterns and fixesanti-patterns.mdScript binding and designusing-scripts.mdSupported product listproducts.md

Minimal Example#

markdown

---
name: pdf-processing
description: Extract PDF text, fill forms, merge files. Use when handling PDFs.
---

## Workflow
1. Extract: `python scripts/extract.py input.pdf`
2. Fill: `python scripts/fill.py template.pdf data.json`

## Gotchas
- Scanned PDFs need OCR first — use `scripts/ocr.py`

Validation#

bash

skills-ref validate ./my-skill