There’s nothing super special about it, it’s just handy if you have some instructions that you don’t need the AI to see all the time, but that you’d like it to have available for specific things.

Maybe you have a custom auth backend that needs an annoying local proxy setup before it can be tested—you don’t need all of those instructions in the primary agents.md bloating the context on every request, a skill would let you separate them so they’re only accessed when needed.

Or if you have a complex testing setup and a multi-step process for generating realistic fixtures and mocks: the AI maybe only needs some basic instructions on how to run the tests 90% of the time, but when it’s time to make significant changes it needs info about your whole workflow and philosophy.

I have a django project with some hardcoded constants that I source from various third party sites, which need to be updated periodically. Originally that meant sitting down and visiting a few websites and copy pasting identifiers from them. As AI got better web search I was able to put together a prompt that did pretty well at compiling them. With a skill I can have the AI find the updated info, update the code itself, and provide it some little test scripts to validate it did everything right.

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hu3 2 days ago | parent [-]

Thanks. I think I could use skills as "instructions I might need but I don't want to clutter AGENTS.md with them".

	▲	Sammi a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes exactly. Skills are just sub agents.md files + an index. The index tells the agent about the content of the .md files and when to use them. Just a short paragraph per file, so it's token efficient and doesn't take much of your context. Poor man's "skills" is just manually managing and adding different .md files to the context. Importantly every time you instruct the agent to do something correctly that it did incorrectly before, you ask it to revise a relevant .md file/"skill", so it has that correction from now on. This is how you slowly build up relevant skills. Things start out as sections in your agents.md file, and then graduate to a separate file when they get large enough.
	▲	JamesSwift a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yes but also because skills are a semi special construct, agents are both better at leveraging them when needed and you can easily tap into them explicitly (eg “use the PR skill to open a PR”)