Agent Skills

Definition

An Agent Skill is a folder the agent can discover and load when the task calls for it. The public contract, from agentskills.io, lives in a SKILL.md: YAML frontmatter (name, triggerable description, licence) and a Markdown body that teaches the procedure. It is not a magic plugin and not a system prompt you paste once: it is executable documentation, versioned, redistributable only when the licence says so.

Shamalo keeps official skills (Cursor, Anthropic, and so on, licence in the open) distinct from teaching skills we write to show the format. The latter do not pretend to compete with the official catalogue.

When it matters

You need one as soon as an agent must repeat a craft gesture — check an SRM, draft a CRO hypothesis, validate a tracking plan — without you re-explaining the procedure every session. The skill lives in the repo, not in the operator’s head.

It is also the right abstraction when you want to audit what the agent is allowed to do: a human can read it, git can diff it, and the loader rejects it if the frontmatter is off-spec.

Pitfalls

The usual failure is treating the skill as a blog post: a slab the agent loads on every turn. You burn the context budget and you drown the triggerable description. The other failure is copying an official skill whose licence does not allow redistribution — Shamalo’s library refuses that grey zone: card + source URL, never a clone.

Related terms

• SKILL.md
• Progressive disclosure
• Context budget

Related tool

Browse, filter and copy Agent Skills, with licence and source stated: Open the skills library.