Agent Skills: The 'Skill Sets' That Make AI Work Like an Expert

In the current explosion of AI Agents, many developers and enterprises face a common dilemma: to make AI complete tasks in specific fields (such as financial report analysis or automated O&M), we need to cram a large number of rules, processes, and precautions into the Prompt. This not only overwhelms the Context Window but also leads to AI being unable to handle complex tasks effectively.

The emergence of Agent Skills is precisely to solve this problem. It is not just "better Prompt," but a new form of knowledge and capability organization.

What are Agent Skills?

Simply put, Agent Skills are a set of modular, pluggable skill sets. It packages the professional knowledge, execution tools, and reference materials required for specific tasks into an independent folder.

It's like giving an AI or a new employee an operation manual and a toolkit. AI usually doesn't need to memorize these contents; only when receiving relevant tasks will it open the corresponding "skill set" and execute it step by step.

Four Core Features

1. Composable

   • Multiple skills can be used together.
   • LLM will automatically identify which skills are needed and coordinate their use.

2. Portable

   • Uses a unified format, write once, use everywhere.
   • Can be used in Claude Desktop, Claude Code, as well as IDEs like Cursor and TRAE (using openskills).

3. Efficient

   • Skill context is less constrained.
   • Loaded only when needed, saving tokens.

4. Executable Code

   • Skills can contain code that the Agent can execute.
   • Certain operations (like sorting lists) are more efficient and accurate when executed with code than when the LLM generates text directly.
   • Provides determinism and reliability.

What is the Use of Agent Skills?

The greatest value of Agent Skills lies in giving AI "hands and feet" and "professional judgment", rather than just generating text.

Typical Scenario: Automated PPT Creation

Traditional AI can only generate the outline text of a PPT, and you need to copy and paste it yourself.
With PPT Skill, the process becomes:

1. Instruction: "Help me turn this weekly report document into a 10-page PPT using the company's blue business template."
2. Skill Operation:
   • Understanding and Planning: Reads the document to extract core points and plans the presentation outline and visual style.
   • Code-based Layout: AI uses HTML language, which it is best at, to build the layout of each page (replacing mouse dragging).
   • Rendering Output: Calls a dedicated script to "compile" the HTML structure into a native .pptx file.
3. Result: Directly outputs a perfectly laid out .pptx file, and you only need to fine-tune it.

Core Working Principle: Progressive Disclosure

This is the most critical design concept of Skills:

This design makes Skills both efficient and scalable.

Physical Structure of a Skill Set

A standard Skill folder usually contains (taking PPT Skill as an example):

pptx/
├── SKILL.md          # Core: Metadata + Operation Guide
├── scripts/          # Toolkit: Python/Node.js scripts (e.g., html2pptx.js)
├── ooxml/            # Dependencies: Dedicated tools for handling underlying XML
└── html2pptx.md      # Documentation: Instructions for specific tools

Among them, SKILL.md is the soul of the skill. Let's take the real PPT Skill as an example to see what it looks like:

---
name: pptx
description: "Presentation creation, editing, and analysis..."
license: Proprietary
---

# PPTX creation, editing, and analysis

## Overview
A user may ask you to create, edit, or analyze the contents of a .pptx file...

## Reading and analyzing content
### Text extraction
If you just need to read the text contents, convert to markdown:
```bash
python -m markitdown path-to-file.pptx
```

## Creating a new PowerPoint presentation
When creating a presentation from scratch, use the **html2pptx** workflow...

### Design Principles
**CRITICAL**: Before creating any presentation, analyze the content and choose appropriate design elements:
1. **Consider the subject matter**: What is this presentation about?
2. **Check for branding**: Consider their brand colors and identity
3. **Match palette to content**: Select colors that reflect the subject

#### Color Palette Selection
**Choosing colors creatively**:
- **Think beyond defaults**: What colors genuinely match this specific topic?
- **Be adventurous**: Try unexpected combinations...

You will find that SKILL.md is not just code documentation, but more like a "job training manual" written for AI. It not only tells AI how to use tools (commands) but also teaches AI how to think like a designer (design principles, color selection).

Execution Flowchart

The following diagram shows how AI discovers, loads, and executes a Skill:

Flow Analysis:

1. Intent Recognition (Matcher):

   • The system combines System Prompt and Skill Index to judge user intent.
   • No Match: Directly replied by the general LLM with fast response speed.
   • Hit Skill: Professional tasks (such as "make a PPT") are identified, and the skill loading process begins.

2. Progressive Loading (Loading):

   • Inject Operation Guide: Reads the SKILL.md core rules to give the Agent an expert perspective.
   • Call Tool: Automatically runs tools like html2pptx to generate slides according to needs, which is not just "thinking" but "doing."

3. Execution & Feedback (Execution & Loop):

   • The Agent generates a response based on the tool execution results.
   • Closed-loop Iteration: If an error occurs or multi-step operations are needed, the execution result is fed back to the Intent Recognition module to trigger a new round of planning until the task is completely finished.

Summary

Agent Skills is an important step in the evolution of AI from "chatbot" to "digital employee." By combining structured knowledge and code execution capability, it allows AI to handle more professional and complex tasks while maintaining system lightweight and scalability.

If you are building your own AI workflow, try encapsulating your most commonly used workflows into a Skill, and you will find that the AI's performance will have a qualitative leap.