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Agent skills are reusable instruction sets that extend your coding agent’s capabilities. They’re defined in SKILL.md files with YAML frontmatter containing a name and description.

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Overview

Skills let agents perform specialized tasks that go beyond their base capabilities. By installing skills, you give your agent domain expertise, workflows, and tool integrations that help it work more effectively on specialized tasks.

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What Can Skills Do?

Skills can teach your agent to:
  • Generate release notes from git history
  • Create pull requests following your team’s conventions
  • Integrate with external tools like Linear, Notion, or other APIs
  • Follow best practices for specific frameworks (React, Next.js, etc.)
  • Automate workflows like code reviews, testing, or deployment
  • Apply design patterns and coding standards to your project

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How Skills Work

Skills are simple directories containing a SKILL.md file with instructions for the agent. The agent reads these instructions when activated and applies them to the current task.

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Basic Structure

---
name: my-skill
description: What this skill does and when to use it
---

# My Skill

Instructions for the agent to follow when this skill is activated.

## When to Use

Describe the scenarios where this skill should be used.

## Steps

1. First, do this
2. Then, do that

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Required Fields

  • name: Unique identifier (lowercase, hyphens allowed)
  • description: Brief explanation of what the skill does and when to use it
The description field is crucial - it helps agents understand when to automatically activate the skill based on the user’s request.

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Discovering Skills

The best way to discover available skills is through:
  • skills.sh - Official skills directory with searchable catalog
  • Interactive search - Run npx skills find for an fzf-style search interface
  • Keyword search - Run npx skills find <query> to search by keyword
  • vercel-labs/agent-skills - Official skills from Vercel
  • Various community repositories on GitHub

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Installation

Installing a skill is simple: 
# Install from GitHub shorthand
npx skills add vercel-labs/agent-skills

# Install specific skills
npx skills add vercel-labs/agent-skills --skill frontend-design

# Install globally (available across all projects)
npx skills add vercel-labs/agent-skills -g
See Installation Methods for more details.

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Skill Scopes

Skills can be installed in two scopes:

Project

Installed to ./<agent>/skills/ and committed with your repository. Skills are shared with your team.

Global

Installed to ~/<agent>/skills/ and available across all projects on your machine.

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Agent Compatibility

Skills follow a shared Agent Skills specification, making them generally compatible across agents. However, some advanced features may be agent-specific:
FeatureMost AgentsClaude Code
Basic skills✓✓
allowed-tools✓✓
context: fork✗✓
Hooks✗✓
See Supported Agents for the complete compatibility matrix.

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Next Steps

Creating Skills

Learn how to create your own custom skills

Source Formats

Explore all supported installation sources

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