Anthropic's Agent Skills standard lets users teach Claude repeatable workflows via SKILL.md

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Anthropic launched Agent Skills as a Claude feature in October 2025 and published it as an open standard on December 18, 2025, at agentskills.io, to solve the problem of users having to re-explain the same workflows every session. The standard is built around a single Markdown file called SKILL.md, containing YAML metadata and plain-language instructions stored in a lightweight folder structure. By mid-2026, around 40 AI tools — including OpenAI Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and Google's Gemini CLI — supported the same file format, making skills portable across platforms. The system uses progressive disclosure, loading only minimal metadata at startup and pulling full instructions or resources only when a relevant workflow is triggered, keeping context usage low. Building a skill requires no API keys, no servers, and no cost, and takes roughly 20–30 minutes using a text editor and Python for optional validation.

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