Agent Skills
Agent Skills are portable instruction packages following the Agent Skills open specification. They keep the agent’s context efficient through progressive disclosure: the agent sees only short names and descriptions until it activates a skill, at which point the full instructions and bundled resources load.
Overview video
Three-stage disclosure
- Discovery (~100 tokens per skill) — names and descriptions appear in the system prompt under
<available_skills>. - Activation (under 5,000 tokens) — full SKILL.md instructions load when the agent calls
activate_skill. - Resources — bundled files mount at
/skills/{name}/and are read with the normal filesystem tools.
This keeps thousands of skills available to an agent without burning context on the ones it doesn’t need.
Two ways to use skills
| Source | Where they live | When to use |
|---|---|---|
| Workspace skills | /.agents/skills/ in the session VFS | Project-specific skills; per-session experimentation |
| Registry skills | Organization-wide via the Skills Registry | Shared across agents; managed via API |
The built-in skills capability handles workspace discovery. Registry skills appear in the capability system as virtual capabilities (skill:{uuid}).
Do something
- Package an agent skill — author a SKILL.md, bundle scripts.
- Publish a skill to the registry — share it.
See also
- Agent Skills capability reference — tools, dependencies, config.
- Skills Registry — the org-wide registry.
- SKILL.md format spec — upstream open spec.