Skills¶

Platforms: claude openai gemini m365-copilot

What Skills Are¶

Skills are folders containing instructions, scripts, and resources that the AI discovers and loads dynamically when relevant to a task. They encapsulate a specific capability — instructions, context, and output format bundled together — so you don't have to re-explain the same task every time.

Skills are now an open standard and being adopted broadly across platforms. Think of them as upgraded prompts: they package a prompt with its context into something reusable, shareable, and automatically invocable.

Key Characteristics¶

• Encapsulates a specific capability — instructions, context, and output format bundled together
• Dynamically loaded or directly invoked — the AI discovers and loads skills automatically when relevant, or you invoke them with a slash command (/plugin-name:command)
• Reusable across conversations — write once, use every time the task comes up
• Shareable — skills can be distributed to others through plugins or file sharing
• Becoming an open standard — the skill format is being adopted across compatible platforms

When to Use a Skill¶

Use a skill when:

• You find yourself writing the same prompt repeatedly
• A workflow step is well-defined enough to package as a repeatable routine
• Consistency matters — the output should follow the same structure every time
• You want others to be able to run the same task with the same quality

A good rule of thumb: if you give an AI the same instructions more than three times, it's time to package those instructions as a skill.

Platform Implementations¶

Agent Skills are an open standard — the same SKILL.md format works across platforms. Each platform reads skill files from its own directory, but the file format is identical:

Anatomy of a Skill¶

A skill is a folder containing:

skill-name/
├── SKILL.md          # Instructions — what the skill does and how
└── references/       # Optional context files the skill needs
    ├── style-guide.md
    └── template.md

The SKILL.md file contains the instructions. The references/ folder holds any context the skill needs — style guides, templates, examples, or data.

On Claude Code, skills with user_invocable: true and a command: field in their frontmatter can be invoked directly as slash commands.

How to Add Skills to Your Platform¶

Skills are plain-text Markdown — no compiled code, no special format. Getting them into your platform takes two steps: get the files, then place them where your platform looks.

Step 1: Get the skill files¶

Option A: Install a plugin (Claude Code)

/plugin install business-first-ai@handsonai

This installs the skills automatically into your project's .claude/skills/ directory.

Option B: Download from GitHub

Browse the plugins directory on GitHub, find the skill folder you want, and download it. Each skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md file and an optional references/ directory.

Step 2: Place them in your platform's skill directory¶

Step 3: Verify¶

Invoke the skill by name in your AI tool. For example, in Claude Code: /business-first-ai:discover. In other platforms, reference the skill name in your prompt — the platform discovers it automatically from the skill directory.

Skill, Project, or Prompt?¶

Guides¶

Related¶

• Agentic Building Blocks — Skills in the context of all seven building blocks
• AI Use Cases — what teams build with skills, organized by six primitives
• Prompts — the foundation that skills build on
• Agents — autonomous systems that invoke skills as part of multi-step workflows
• Agents & Skills — pre-built skills you can download or install