On October 22, Anthropic donated Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation, which is part of the Linux Foundation. According to the announcement, more than 70 platforms already support the standard, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code.

If you do not work with AI tools every day, the name "Agent Skills" makes it sound much more complicated than it is.

A skill is just a folder with a plain text file inside it called SKILL.md. There is no magic binary code. Inside that file, you write down the exact instructions for how you want the AI to do a repeating job, and you can include helper scripts or reference notes in the same folder if the job needs them.

I already run my own MCP server and use skills every week to help manage our servers and draft posts like this one. For example, I have one skill that takes a list of weekly news links and turns them into five different story angles, and another skill that holds the style sheet for how I write in English and Portuguese (so the AI does not sound like a press release).

Before this week, the big annoyance with AI was that every company wanted to lock you into its own way of working. If you spent a weekend teaching one AI how your business works, you had to start over from scratch if you wanted to try a different model next month.

Having the Linux Foundation take over the SKILL.md standard fixes that. Le and I have run our business on Linux since we started RogerLe.com in 1996, and the main reason is that we own our setup. If a piece of software changes its pricing or goes in a direction we do not like, we can take our files and move. Now we can do the exact same thing with the instructions we write for our AI crew. You write the SKILL.md file once, keep it on your own disk, and use it with whatever AI tool is doing the best job that month.

If you run a small business, you do not need to be a programmer to write a skill this weekend. You just open a text editor and write the steps the same way you would explain them to a new hire. Here are three simple ones you could write in an hour:

  1. A reply style sheet. Write down ten rules for how you answer customer emails (how you greet people, words you never use, how you sign off) so your drafts actually sound like you.
  2. A Monday morning checklist. List the exact pages, forms, or logs you check every Monday, and tell the agent how to format the summary report.
  3. A quote or invoice checker. Write down your standard rates, tax rules, and payment terms so the AI can check a draft invoice for mistakes before you send it.

One caution before you start downloading skills that other people wrote. Because a SKILL.md file is just instructions that tell an AI agent what to do, a bad skill can tell your agent to do something stupid, or even send your private data somewhere else.

Treat a downloaded skill the same way you would treat a shell script you found on a forum. Since it is just a text file, open it up and read every line before you let it near your computer.