Question 1

What is an Agent Skill?

Accepted Answer

An Agent Skill is a structured, declarative capability that an AI agent can invoke to perform an action through a system. Unlike prompts, Skills define explicit boundaries, permissions, and execution rules that machines can enforce.

Question 2

How do Agent Skills differ from prompts?

Accepted Answer

Prompts are implicit natural language suggestions with trust-based, non-deterministic behavior. Skills are explicit structured capabilities with contract-based, auditable, and governable execution. Prompts decide what to try; Skills define what is allowed.

Question 3

What's the difference between Skills, tools, and workflows?

Accepted Answer

Tools are low-level primitives, workflows are pre-wired sequences, and Skills are bounded capabilities that agents choose to invoke. Skills sit at the decision boundary between reasoning and execution.

Question 4

Why do AI agents need Skills instead of just prompts?

Accepted Answer

Prompt-driven agents don't scale at enterprise level. They can hallucinate actions, have implicit permissions, opaque execution paths, and are impossible to audit. Skills provide the control, governance, and security that enterprises demand.

Question 5

What role does MCP play with Agent Skills?

Accepted Answer

MCP (Model Context Protocol) provides a transport-agnostic execution layer for Skills, enabling remote skill invocation, enterprise security boundaries, air-gap compatibility, and audit/governance hooks. MCP turns Skills from ideas into infrastructure.

Question 6

Are Agent Skills becoming a standard?

Accepted Answer

Yes. What started as framework-specific abstractions is converging into shared specifications, common schemas, public registries, installation tooling, and usage tracking. Skills are becoming the standard unit of agent execution, governance, and enterprise adoption.

Question 7

Can Agent Skills be audited for security?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Unlike prompts, Skills are structured with explicit schemas, making them auditable and governable. They provide clear artifacts for security reviews, permission tracking, and execution path analysis.

Question 8

Where do Agent Skills execute?

Accepted Answer

Skills don't live in the model—they live in systems. The model handles reasoning, while Skills execute in controlled environments with proper security boundaries and governance. This separation ensures authority stays with the system, not the AI.

2 posts tagged with "Agentic AI"

What Is an Agent Skill? The Standard Unit for AI Agent Capabilities

SDKs are Dead: Embracing Agent Skills for Automation