skill
In AI, a skill is a packaged set of instructions, procedures, and reference material that an AI agent loads to carry out a specific task.
A skill gives an AI agent the goals, steps, rules, and examples for a recurring task as a single unit. Anthropic introduced the format for Claude as Agent Skills in 2025: each skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md file with a name, a description, and instructions, along with any scripts or reference files it needs.
An agent normally sees only each skill's name and description and loads the full contents when a task calls for it. Unlike a prompt typed into a single conversation, a skill is written once and reused across tasks and people, and several skills can be distributed together inside a plugin. Outside AI, the word simply means a person's ability or expertise.
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Articles covering this entry
An AI skill is a reusable set of instructions for an AI tool.
Reusable Agent Skills can package repeated work, such as preparing a feature branch and drafting spec files.