What are AI agent skills?
AI agent skills (also called agentic skills, Claude Code skills, Cursor skills, or SKILL.md playbooks) are reusable instruction packages for coding agents.
One-sentence answer: A skill is a folder with a required
SKILL.md file (name + description + instructions) that an agent loads when the task matches.Folder shape
skills/my-skill/ SKILL.md # required scripts/ # optional gpt.md # optional model variant (Major AI Skills)
How agents use them
- Discover skills by name/description
- Load full
SKILL.mdwhen relevant - Or invoke explicitly (
@skill-idin Cursor)
Breadth vs depth
- Giant coding catalogs - architecture, security, DevOps
- Major AI Skills - 402 skills: apps, cloud/devops, web/mobile + token efficiency
- Official vendor packs - format reference (e.g. Anthropic)