Anthropic Skills

The reference implementation of what a skill should look like

Anthropic publishes a set of agent skills covering document formats, spreadsheets, presentations and internal workflows. Beyond being useful, the repository is the clearest available answer to what belongs in a skill and what does not.

FreeNo licence file in the repositorySelf hostable

The shape is the lesson

A skill is a folder with instructions and optional scripts, loaded when its description matches the task. The interesting constraint is the description: it decides whether the skill is ever found, so it is written for retrieval rather than for a human reader.

Reading several of these makes the pattern obvious. Instructions are procedural, not explanatory. They tell the model what to do in what order, and push reference material into separate files loaded only when needed.

Using them directly

The document skills are immediately practical. Producing a real spreadsheet or a formatted document is exactly the kind of task where a model without instructions produces something almost right.

Fork rather than copy. These are written for general use, and a skill tuned to your own conventions outperforms a general one every time.

Reach for it when

you are writing your first skill and want a correct model
you need documents and spreadsheets produced properly
you want to see how progressive disclosure is meant to work

Watch out for

general purpose skills are always beaten by ones tuned to your conventions
a skill is only loaded if its description matches the task, so a vague description makes it invisible
there is no licence file in the repository, so check with the publisher before redistributing anything from it
the format is young and still moving

NEXT TO IT ON THE SHELF

Anthropic Skills

The shape is the lesson

Using them directly

Reach for it when

Watch out for

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AGENTS.md

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New entries, as they land