IBL News | New York
Anthropic said last week that it would release its Agents Skills technology as an open standard, with a reference SDK available at agentskills.io.
To date, Microsoft has adopted Agent Skills in VS Code and GitHub and has coding initiatives such as Cursor, Goose, Amp, and OpenCode, among others.
At their core, Agent Skills are folders containing instructions, scripts, and resources that tell AI systems how to perform specific tasks consistently, using reusable modules, rather than requiring elaborate prompts each time. It’s a new way to build specialized agents using files and folders.
Each skill takes only a few dozen tokens to summarize the context window, with full details loading only when the task requires them.
This architecture allows for the deployment of extensive skill libraries without overwhelming the AI’s working memory.
The coding community has received the tools very well, awarding the skills repository on GitHub with 30,000 stars.
Atlassian’s Jira and Confluence, Figma, Canva, Stripe, and Zapier are participating as partnering developers in the launch of Skills.
It’s a mutually beneficial ecosystem similar to the MCP connector partner relationship.
The Skills approach is a shift from the AI industry’s approach of building specialized agents for different use cases — a customer service agent, a coding agent, a research agent. Skills suggest a different model: one general-purpose agent equipped with a library of specialized capabilities.
This insight has significant implications for enterprise software development. Rather than building and maintaining multiple specialized AI systems, organizations can invest in creating and curating skills that encode their institutional knowledge and best practices.
To activate skills, developers need to write a SKILL.md file with custom guidance for their agent. As mentioned, a skill is a directory containing a SKILL.md file that includes organized folders of instructions, scripts, and resources, giving agents additional capabilities.
Claude Code (w/ Opus 4.5) is the most powerful agent in the world.
And @AnthropicAI just released Skills.
In this video:
(1) What is a coding agent?
(2) Using Claude Code as a general agent
(3) Setting up Claude Skills in Claude Code
(4) Building a skill that can post on x… pic.twitter.com/cG7uJcXnJ6— Riley Brown (@rileybrown) December 21, 2025