AI coding glossary
Agent Skills Standard
Also known as: agent skills spec, skill.md standard
In one sentence
The open standard that defines SKILL.md as a portable AI instruction format across every major AI coding tool.
Full definition
The Agent Skills standard is the open specification that defines the SKILL.md format, Markdown with YAML frontmatter for reusable AI instructions. It was adopted across the AI coding ecosystem in 2025-2026 because all the major tools (Claude Code, Cursor, OpenAI Codex CLI, Windsurf, GitHub Copilot, Cline, AWS Kiro, Google Antigravity 2.0) needed an interoperable way to share workflows. The skills-hub.ai registry indexes 4,900+ skills following the standard. The standard is community-driven, MIT-licensed, and intentionally minimal, only `name` and `description` are required in frontmatter.