Explain Skills Like I'm Five 🧠

Okay, let's talk about Agent Skills.

If you're working with AI coding assistants—Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, whatever—you've probably noticed something: they're really good at general stuff, but kinda clueless about your specific workflow.

Need to generate a PDF that follows your company's exact formatting rules? Good luck explaining that from scratch every single time.

Here's the thing: you don't have to anymore.

So what are Agent Skills, actually?

Pulls down projector screen and whips out laser pointer

Agent Skills are folders full of instructions that your AI assistant can read and follow. That's it. No fancy plugins, no complex APIs, no vendor lock-in drama.

At its simplest, a skill is a directory with a file called SKILL.md. That file contains:

1. A name and description — So your AI knows when to use it
2. Instructions — What to actually do, step by step
3. Optional extras — Scripts, templates, reference docs, whatever helps

When you ask your AI for help, it checks its installed skills. If one matches your request, it loads those instructions and follows them. Consistently. Every time.

It's like giving your AI a playbook instead of hoping it figures things out on the fly.

But here's where it gets interesting

Anthropic released Agent Skills as an open standard in December 2025. The spec is open, so any tool can implement it. And they are.

OpenAI added support to Codex in December 2025. GitHub Copilot added it the same month. VS Code supports it through Copilot. Cursor is building support. Claude obviously runs on it from day one.

The same skill file works across all of them.

One skill. Multiple AI coding tools. No rewriting instructions for different platforms.

That's... kind of a big deal.

How do I use them?

Installing a skill is dead simple:

1. Download or copy the skill folder
2. Drop it in your skills directory (check supported platforms for specific paths)
3. That's it. Your AI will find it automatically.

Want a skill for your whole team? Put it in your project's skills folder and commit it to git. Now everyone has it.

For detailed installation instructions, see our supported platforms guide.

Why should I care?

Let's be real—AI assistants are only as useful as the context you give them. And most of us are terrible at consistently providing good context.

Skills solve that. They package up your best prompts, your team's standards, and your hard-won knowledge into something reusable.

Instead of explaining your code review process every time, you install a code review skill once. Instead of remembering the exact format for your API docs, you install a documentation skill.

It's not about making AI smarter. It's about making it consistently good at the specific things you need. (Wondering about skills vs agents? That's a different thing.)

The brass tacks

• Skills are just files — Markdown with a bit of YAML. Nothing scary.
• They're portable — Works on Claude, Codex, Cursor, and more
• They're shareable — Just files in a folder, share however you want
• They're composable — Use multiple skills together for complex workflows

If you're already using AI coding tools, skills are the next level. If you're not, skills are a good reason to start.

That's Agent Skills in a nutshell. Not magic, not complicated—just a smart way to make your AI assistant actually useful at the things you do every day.

Now go find some skills and stop repeating yourself.