Agent Skills

Agent Skills are pre-written work instructions you hand to an AI agent. It's like giving a new hire a well-organized manual instead of teaching them the job from scratch every time — they can start working right away. These instructions typically include the steps to follow, common mistakes to avoid, and reference examples, so the agent handles the same task the same way each time instead of fumbling through it differently every attempt.

In practice, this shows up in two forms. One is seen on platforms like Alibaba's Wan video generation tool, where users share and reuse each other's workflows. Someone sets up the steps for making a short drama or a music video once, and others just swap in their own script or song. The other is an open format proposed by Anthropic, which bundles instruction files with executable scripts to give coding agents (tools that write code for you) specialized knowledge about a particular service or task.

In both cases, the core idea is the same: build a proven, reusable workflow once so you don't have to explain it from scratch every time, and pull it out — or share it with others — whenever you need it.

Alibaba's Wan named its feature for sharing community-made video workflows "Agent Skills," while AWS borrowed the same-named open format proposed by Anthropic and applied it to cloud policy validation tasks. It helps to remember this isn't a single fixed product but an open approach that different companies adopt and implement in their own ways.

1. If you're using a coding agent like Claude Code or Cursor, try creating a short text file that lays out the steps and cautions for a task you repeat often.
2. Hand this file to the agent as reference material and have it perform the same task.
3. Next time you assign the same task, give it the file again and compare how much more consistent the results are compared to before.