Update: Agent Skills has been released as an open standard, enabling portability across platforms. 18 december 2025) With advancing model capabilities, we can now create versatile agents capable of operating within complete, real-world computing environments. For instance, Claude Code can handle intricate, multi-domain tasks by leveraging local code execution and filesystem access. As these agents grow more powerful, we require more modular, scalable, and portable methods for giving them specialized domain knowledge. This motivated us to develop Agent Skills—structured directories containing instructions, scripts, and resources that agents can dynamically discover and load to improve their performance on particular tasks. Skills enhance Claude’s abilities by bundling your knowledge into reusable resources, turning general-purpose agents into specialized ones tailored to your specific requirements. Creating a skill for an agent is similar to preparing an onboarding manual for a new employee. Rather than creating isolated, one-off agents for every specific use case, anyone can now equip their agents with reusable, composable skills by capturing and sharing their procedural knowledge. This article explains what Skills are, demonstrates how they function, and provides best practices for creating your own. A skill is a directory that contains a SKILL.
Anthropic Engineering