Agent SkillsPractical Guides
What Are Agent Skills? How They Differ from Prompts
Understand when a reusable Agent Skill is worth building, what belongs in SKILL.md, and when a normal prompt is enough.
2026/08/24
How to Write a Reliable SKILL.md
A practical structure for writing small, predictable Agent Skills with clear triggers, resources, and evaluation cases.
A useful SKILL.md is not a long expert persona. It is an operating manual for
one repeatable job.
Start from observed work
Document a task that has already been completed successfully. Capture the real inputs, decisions, tools, output, and common failure modes.
Define the trigger precisely
Describe user language that should activate the Skill and nearby requests that should not. A Skill that triggers too broadly increases context cost and can change unrelated work.
Write the shortest reliable workflow
Each step should add information, make a decision, use a tool, or verify an artifact. Remove motivational prose and repeated reminders.
Separate instructions from resources
Keep essential behavior in SKILL.md. Put large references, templates, and
scripts in dedicated folders and tell the Agent exactly when to load them.
Add evaluation cases
Test a normal case, a missing-input case, a boundary case, and a request that must not trigger the Skill. Predictability matters more than length.
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Field notes
Get new Agent Skills, prompt patterns, and honest implementation notes. No fabricated metrics, no daily noise.