Creating Agent Skill

Creating Agent Skills

Overview

This skill provides capabilities for creating and reviewing Agent Skills that comply with the Agent Skills specification and follow authoring best practices.

Agent Skills are a lightweight, open format for extending AI agent capabilities with specialized knowledge and workflows. A skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md file with metadata and instructions, optionally bundled with scripts, references, and assets.

Capabilities

Standards

This skill bundles the following standards in standards/:

Principles

1. Concise is Key

The context window is a shared resource. Only add context the agent doesn't already have. Challenge each piece of information: "Does the agent really need this explanation?"

2. Progressive Disclosure

Structure skills for efficient context use:

• Metadata (~100 tokens): name and description loaded at startup
• Instructions (<5000 tokens recommended): Full SKILL.md body loaded when activated
• Resources (as needed): Additional files loaded only when required

3. Set Appropriate Degrees of Freedom

Match specificity to task fragility:

• High freedom: Text-based instructions for flexible tasks
• Medium freedom: Pseudocode or parameterised scripts
• Low freedom: Exact scripts for fragile, error-prone operations

4. Test with Real Usage

Build evaluations before extensive documentation. Test with representative tasks. Iterate based on observed agent behavior, not assumptions.

Usage

1. Load this skill manifest
2. Identify the required capability (create or review)
3. Load the bundled standards from standards/
4. Execute the action following actions/<capability>.md

References

• Agent Skills Specification
• What are Agent Skills?
• Skill Authoring Best Practices
• Example Skills
• Reference Library