So we've been talking about AGENTS.md and progressive disclosure, and we've not been very kind to AGENTS.md.
So wouldn't it be great if there was a built-in solution accepted by the community as the right way to do progressive disclosure when you're steering agents?
And that solution is Agent Skills. It's an open format accepted across coding agents, including Claude Code.
It is a simple open format for giving agents new capabilities and expertise.
Agent skills are folders of instructions, scripts, and resources that agents can discover. The key word there is discover, because they are not forced to take this information in. They're not forced to see it, but it is in a place that they can easily discover it.
Let's take our example from before to illustrate what we mean.
Before, all of these React Router-style instructions were just forced on the agent. They were present in its context window. Same for all of these front end ones and same for all of these database ones. All of the instructions were right there.
But what if instead we refactored these into their own file and we gave a little bit of metadata to the agent to say: use this skill when you need help with the React Router Framework, use this one when you need help writing front-end code, use this one when you need help writing database or Drizzle code.
And so all the agent would see by default would be the name of the skill and then the description of the skill:
And then if it chose to, inside the session, it could basically call the React Router skill and bam - all of the instructions would become available to it:
This is the idea behind skills: they allow you to progressively disclose instructions.
They also allow you to kind of build a user interface for your agent of all the information it might need to know.