SYSTEM Cited by 5 sources

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 concepts/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 patterns/migration-as-agent-skill with patterns/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.

Related

• concepts/agent-skills-discovery — concept page.
• concepts/well-known-uri — substrate.
• concepts/mcp-server-card / systems/model-context-protocol — sibling discovery surfaces.
• concepts/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.
• patterns/well-known-endpoint-discovery — umbrella pattern.
• concepts/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.
• patterns/agent-provisioning-protocol — the protocol Agent Skills compose with at the task altitude.