What Is a Skill?

The third time you correct your agent the same way, you are looking at a skill.

Your agent already has skills. When you say “keep this somewhere I can find it later,” it knows how to capture. When you say “what changed while I was away,” it knows how to look at the remote without touching your work. You never called those by name. You said what you wanted, and the agent recognised the situation.

That is what a skill is: a way of working, written down once, that the agent applies whenever the situation comes up.

What AI Agent Skills Are and How They Work

Where skills come from

Two places.

Some arrive with the agent. Capture, check for updates, share, ask a person a question. They are the same in every ideaspace, so nobody has to invent them. You do not need to learn their names. Say what you want.

The rest you make. This is the part worth understanding. You are working with your agent on your writing, and for the third time you say, “show me the original sentence before you rewrite it.” That correction is already a skill. It just has not been written down yet. Tell your agent:

“We keep doing this. Make it part of how you work.”

The agent asks when this applies, walks through the last time it happened, shows you a short page, and saves it when you agree. From then on it happens without you asking. If it stops helping, say so and change it.

How to think about them

A skill is how to do, not what to think. Skills do. Deciding what is worth doing stays with you. Rick Rubin makes the distinction between skill and taste: skill can be taught and repeated, taste cannot. Give your agent the skills. Keep the taste.

Write the trigger, not the manual. The most important line in a skill is when it applies. “When I ask you to review a draft.” “At the end of each week.” “Before telling me something is true.” A skill with a clear trigger and three steps beats a long procedure nobody reads.

A skill is a page you can question. It lives in your space as an ordinary page, in a folder called _agent/skills/. You can read it, ask your agent what it means, or change a line. Nothing is hidden inside the model.

Skills travel with the space. When someone forks your space, your skills come along. When you fork this manual, you get its skills. An agent arriving in a space is shown which skills live there before it does anything. This is how a way of working spreads: not by explaining it, but by handing over the place where it is written down.

Skills belong to a place. A skill in a folder applies to everything below it. A more specific skill deeper in the tree takes over from a general one above. Keep a skill where the work is, and it will not get in the way anywhere else.

Start small

You do not need to design skills. Notice the correction you keep making. Say “make this part of how you work.” Read what the agent shows you. Agree or change it. That is the whole practice.

The skills you end up with will describe how you actually work, because that is where each one came from.