Authoring Agent Skills: A Software-Engineering Approach
Agent Skills are an emerging way to extend large language model agents with reusable procedural knowledge that the agent loads on demand. Anthropic introduced Agent Skills and published the format as an open specification supported across several agent tools. This note argues that a skill is a software artefact and that its construction should follow software-engineering principles, with qualifications: single responsibility, separation of interface from implementation, low coupling, and economy in a shared token budget, together with behavioural evaluation in place of deterministic testing. Using Claude Code as the reference implementation, it describes how a skill is structured, how its...
| Authors | Giuseppe Destefanis |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 27 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 July 2026 |
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