What Are Agent Skills Beyond Claude?

Agent Skills are a design pattern, originating with Anthropic's Claude, for building modular and reusable capabilities for AI agents. A skill is distinct from a tool (a single action) as it orchestrates multiple tools to accomplish a complex task effectively. While Claude often uses natural language instructions in Markdown files, skills can be implemented in code like Python for more deterministic behavior in custom, non-Claude systems. This approach allows skills to function like agentic RAG, dynamically retrieving data from tools or data sources to perform their function without needing all context upfront.