Skills on AI Knowledge Base

Introduction to Agent Skills

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Learn to build structured, reusable capabilities for Claude-based agents using the Agent Skills framework. Covers skill design, packaging, tool orchestration, and deployment patterns. This is Anthropic’s bridge between basic API usage and production agent development — take it after the Claude API course and before diving into the Agent SDK Deep Dive learning path.

Best Practices

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This guide distills hard-won patterns for building reliable agent skills that perform well across diverse user inputs and edge cases. Pay particular attention to the guidance on error handling within skill execution and how to design tool descriptions that minimize misuse by the model. A common mistake is writing overly generic skill descriptions, which leads Claude to invoke skills in inappropriate contexts and degrades overall agent quality. Start here after completing the skills quickstart to refine your implementations before deploying to production.

Create plugins

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Create custom plugins to extend Claude Code with skills, agents, hooks, and MCP servers.

Enterprise

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The enterprise skills guide addresses deployment concerns that only surface at organizational scale: access control, audit logging, skill versioning, and multi-tenant isolation. Focus on the permission model and how skill execution contexts are sandboxed — getting this wrong can expose one tenant’s data to another. A key pitfall is treating enterprise skill deployment as a simple extension of single-user patterns; the authentication and authorization layers add meaningful complexity to the skill lifecycle. Read this after the quickstart and best practices guides, as it assumes familiarity with core skill mechanics.

Extend Claude Code

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Understand when to use CLAUDE.md, Skills, subagents, hooks, MCP, and plugins.

Extend Claude with skills

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Create, manage, and share skills to extend Claude’s capabilities in Claude Code. Includes custom slash commands.

Overview

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This overview introduces the agent skills framework, which provides a structured way to package and distribute reusable capabilities that Claude-based agents can invoke. Skills sit between raw tool definitions and full agent architectures, giving you a composable middle layer for common tasks like code review, PR creation, or domain-specific analysis. Start here before reading the individual tool docs to understand how skills orchestrate multiple tools into cohesive workflows. The key architectural decision is which capabilities to implement as standalone tools versus packaged skills, and this doc provides the mental model for making that choice.

Quickstart

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This quickstart walks you through building your first agent skill end-to-end, from definition to invocation within a Claude-powered agent. Focus on the skill registration pattern and how the runtime discovers and exposes skills to the model — getting this wiring right is foundational for everything else. Be aware that the quickstart uses simplified error handling; production skills need retry logic and graceful degradation as covered in the best practices guide. Work through this hands-on before reading the enterprise or best practices docs to build concrete intuition first.

Skills

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Skills in the Agent SDK are the primary abstraction for packaging reusable capabilities that agents can invoke — think of them as higher-level building blocks above raw tool definitions. Focus on how skill registration exposes capabilities to the agent runtime and how the SDK handles skill discovery, parameter validation, and result formatting. A subtle but important detail is how skill descriptions influence the model’s decision to invoke them; poorly written descriptions lead to unreliable skill selection. Read this reference alongside the agent-skills quickstart and best practices guides for the full picture from concept to production-ready implementation.

Skills Guide

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Skills are a powerful abstraction for packaging reusable capabilities that Claude can invoke within IDE integrations and agent workflows. This guide walks through defining, registering, and composing skills so your agent can dispatch specialized behaviors without bloating the system prompt. Pay close attention to how skill discovery works at runtime, since misconfigurations here silently degrade agent performance rather than producing obvious errors. Read this alongside the Agent Skills overview doc to understand the full lifecycle from definition to invocation.