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Agent Skills (standard)

Overview

Agent Skills is an emerging standard for publishing task-instructional documents (skill documents) at a fixed well-known URL so AI agents can discover what specialised tasks a site's ecosystem can help perform.

Cloudflare's proposed discovery mechanism: an index JSON document at /.well-known/agent-skills/index.json listing each skill document and its URL — see agent-skills-discovery for the discovery concept.

Shape

  • Index file at the well-known URL listing skills.
  • Skill documents — prose / structured markdown / JSON describing how to perform a specific task against the site. Richer than a tool schema (which says "call this function with these args"); more like a playbook ("here's the sequence, the prerequisites, the common pitfalls, an example").

The draft spec lives at cloudflare/agent-skills-discovery-rfc. Community site at agentskills.io.

Complementary to MCP tool schemas

  • MCP tool schemas — function signatures, machine-callable.
  • MCP Server Cards — pre-connect description of an MCP server.
  • Agent Skills — task-level how-to prose the agent reads and reasons over.

The three address different altitudes of agent-action guidance: callable surface (MCP tools), server metadata (MCP Server Card), task playbook (Agent Skill).

Self-referential reference implementation

isitagentready.com publishes its Agent Skills index at https://isitagentready.com/.well-known/agent-skills/index.json — one skill document per standard it checks. An agent that scans a site with isitagentready and gets a failing robots.txt check can fetch the relevant skill document and apply the remediation without human-written prompt engineering.

As a framework-migration delivery surface (2026-02-24)

The 2026-02-24 vinext launch adds a second consumption pattern for Agent Skills: shipping framework migrations as Agent Skills. cloudflare/vinext is the canonical wiki instance — npx skills add cloudflare/vinext, then "migrate this project to vinext" in Claude Code, OpenCode, Cursor, Codex CLI, or any other supported tool. The skill handles compat checks, dependency install, config generation, and dev-server startup. Agent Skills gain cross-tool migration tooling as a use case alongside the well-known-URL self-description use case.

Status (2026-04)

Draft standard. Cloudflare is authoring the RFC and dogfooding it simultaneously (isitagentready scans the site's /.well-known/agent-skills/index.json and grades its presence under the Agent Readiness Score's Agent Actions dimension). Wider uptake expected as the spec matures and MCP-client implementations grow discovery support for it.

Seen in

  • sources/2026-04-17-cloudflare-introducing-the-agent-readiness-score-is-your-site-agent-ready — canonical wiki instance. isitagentready.com's own Agent Skills index is the reference implementation.
  • sources/2026-04-01-cloudflare-emdash-wordpress-spiritual-successor — Agent Skills shipped inside a product for the first time on this wiki: every EmDash instance includes Agent Skills describing plugin capabilities, triggering hooks, a plugin-authoring skill, and a WordPress-theme-to-EmDash porting skill. Agents pointed at an EmDash codebase find the skills and work from them. Extends Agent Skills from "a well-known-URL-on-your-site discovery surface" (2026-04-17 canonical instance) to "a shipped-in-the-product integration-guidance surface" — two distinct deployment shapes of the same primitive.
  • sources/2026-02-03-instacart-migrating-to-jetpack-compose — Agent Skills as a mobile-UI-framework migration delivery surface — third deployment shape on the wiki. Instacart Caper formalised a 325+ line markdown migration guide (for Android Fragments → Jetpack Compose) into a structured Agent Skill with a 17-step workflow across four stages and engineer verification checkpoints including Paparazzi visual-parity gates. Core property leveraged: progressive disclosure — "skills enable progressive disclosure of information, allowing the AI to access exactly what it needs at each step without overwhelming the context window"; the migration guide's full- content-in-every-prompt cost (325+ lines on every migration) is replaced by step-scoped skill sections. First wiki instance of Agent Skills driving Android mobile refactoring; complements Cloudflare/vinext (Next.js → web framework) + EmDash (plugin/theme authoring) prior instances. Extends migration-as-agent-skill with ai-migration-skill-workflow's multi-step engineer-checkpointed variant.
  • sources/2026-04-30-cloudflare-agents-can-now-create-cloudflare-accounts-buy-domains-and-deploy — Agent Skills named as the task-altitude companion to the agent-provisioning protocol. The protocol solves access (account, credentials, budget); Agent Skills solve know-how (the step-by-step how-to for a specific task against the now-accessible platform). Cloudflare's launch framing: "with Cloudflare's Code Mode MCP server and Agent Skills, they're even better at it." Code Mode
  • Agent Skills + the provisioning protocol compose into the full agent-autonomy stack — each solves a different altitude.
  • sources/2026-09-24-atlassian-how-we-automated-feature-flag-cleanup-with-agentic-pipelines — Agent Skills as the rich half of a thin-prompt/rich-skill split in a CI coding agent — a distinct deployment shape from the discovery / in-product / migration instances above. Atlassian's feature-flag-cleanup pipeline keeps the agent prompt thin and puts all the domain logic in a versioned, reviewable skill file: how flags are registered, consumed across frontend/backend, and the per-call-site transformations (conditionals, ternaries, variable assignments). Two properties this instance foregrounds: (1) skill portability — "the same skill works whether it's triggered by the pipeline or run interactively by a developer"; (2) skill as a living document — "codebase conventions drift. A skill that isn't revisited after real runs will eventually miss an edge case," so the skill is the part they "keep rewriting" and each run uses the newest version. See patterns/dispatcher-coding-agent-closer and concepts/separation-of-concerns.
  • agent-skills-discovery — concept page.
  • well-known-uri — substrate.
  • mcp-server-card / systems/model-context-protocol — sibling discovery surfaces.
  • agent-readiness-score — where this is graded.
  • systems/isitagentready — reference-implementation publisher.
  • systems/emdash — product shipping Agent Skills in-tree as plugin-authoring / theme-porting guidance.
  • well-known-endpoint-discovery — umbrella pattern.
  • provider-service-catalog-api — sibling discovery primitive at the service-existence altitude (Agent Skills is the task altitude).
  • systems/stripe-projects — orchestrator that exposes Agent-Skills-complementary service catalogs via the agent-provisioning protocol.
  • agent-provisioning-protocol — the protocol Agent Skills compose with at the task altitude.
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