Agent Skills

Agent Skills standard reference guide. Covers SKILL.md specification format, progressive loading, skill discovery and activation, authoring best practices, quality evaluation, description optimization, and more.

Agent Skills Standard

A standardized way to equip AI Agents with new capabilities and domain expertise. Adopted by 35+ Agent products.

Use Cases

Use when creating new skills, validating skill formats, optimizing existing skills, or learning about standardized skill system design.

Reference File Routing

Need	Read
Quick skill creation (5-step guide)	quick-start.md
SKILL.md format spec + Agent integration	spec.md
Authoring best practices + quality eval + description optimization	authoring.md
Common anti-patterns and fixes	anti-patterns.md
Script binding and design	using-scripts.md
Supported product list	products.md

Minimal Example

markdown

---
name: pdf-processing
description: Extract PDF text, fill forms, merge files. Use when handling PDFs.
---

## Workflow
1. Extract: `python scripts/extract.py input.pdf`
2. Fill: `python scripts/fill.py template.pdf data.json`

## Gotchas
- Scanned PDFs need OCR first — use `scripts/ocr.py`

Validation

bash

skills-ref validate ./my-skill