The SKILL.md Format: A Standard for Portable AI Agent Capabilities
Every time you build an AI agent, you define what it can do through prompts, tools, and configuration. But what if those capabilities were portable — packaged in a format that any agent framework c...

Source: DEV Community
Every time you build an AI agent, you define what it can do through prompts, tools, and configuration. But what if those capabilities were portable — packaged in a format that any agent framework could understand? That is the idea behind SKILL.md, a Markdown-based format for defining AI agent skills. Why Another Format? The AI agent ecosystem is fragmented. LangChain has its own way of defining tools. CrewAI has another. AutoGPT has yet another. If you build a useful capability for one framework, porting it to another means rewriting everything. SKILL.md takes a different approach: define the what, not the how. A skill file describes inputs, outputs, behavior, and constraints in plain Markdown. The agent framework handles implementation. Anatomy of a SKILL.md File --- name: contract-analyzer version: 1.0.0 author: [email protected] category: legal --- # Contract Analyzer ## Description Analyzes legal contracts and extracts key terms, obligations, and potential risks. ## Inputs - `d