Talk · 16m · AI Engineer Code Summit 2025

Don't Build Agents, Build Skills Instead

Barry Zhang and Mahesh Murag · on AI Engineer

Why Anthropic packages know-how as Skills, folders of instructions and scripts, instead of building new agents.

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What you'll take away

A skill is a folder: a short description, instructions and optional scripts
Progressive disclosure: the agent only loads a skill's detail when it needs it
One general agent plus many skills beats lots of narrow agents
Skills sit alongside MCP: MCP connects to things, skills say how to do the job

Mentioned in the talk

Agent Skills docs ↗

SkillsAgentsClaude

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