Recently, Anthropic has open-sourced a knowledge base called "Agent Skills" on GitHub, with the project address being anthropics/skills. This resource aims to provide practical example skills and best practices for the Claude model's skill system, helping developers better utilize the model for various applications.

In this knowledge base, users can find 16 public example skills covering multiple fields, including document processing, creative design, development techniques, and enterprise communication. These skills are designed with real-world application needs in mind, and the document processing skills (such as handling docx and pdf files) have already been effectively applied in Claude's production environment, demonstrating their practical value.

Developers can use these skills directly through the plugin marketplace of Claude Code or on Claude.ai (for paid users). At the same time, developers can also create custom skills based on the provided specifications and templates, further enriching Claude's capabilities. This process provides developers with greater flexibility, allowing them to build skills tailored to their specific application scenarios.

The functionality of Agent Skills enables users to define a set of instructions in the form of packable and reusable folders. These folders contain Markdown documentation files (including YAML metadata), scripts, and other resources to guide the model to efficiently complete specific tasks. It is worth noting that this functionality is now available to all paid users, supporting Claude.ai, Claude Code, and its API.

The core advantage of this functionality lies in its secure coding environment, which allows automation at the command-line level. This feature enables Claude to transition from a single coding assistant to a general-purpose computer agent capable of performing any task that can be completed through a terminal. In addition, Agent Skills uses a demand-based loading mechanism, loading the full skill content only when a task matches, significantly reducing Token consumption while retaining necessary metadata.

github:https://github.com/anthropics/skills

Key points:

🌟  Anthropic has open-sourced the Agent Skills knowledge base, containing 16 example skills covering multiple fields.

🛠️  Developers can use or customize skills directly to enhance the application capabilities of the Claude model.

⚙️  The Skills function implements on-demand loading, reducing Token consumption and improving efficiency.