--- title: Agent Skills: Progressive Disclosure as a System Design... description: Agent Skills is an open standard released by Anthropic in December 2025 that uses a simple SKILL.md file format to give AI agents modular, progressively loaded... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/agent-skills-progressive-disclosure-as-a-system-design-pattern-nanbjcqsc twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Agent Skills: Progressive Disclosure as a System Design Pattern | daily.dev og:description: Agent Skills is an open standard released by Anthropic in December 2025 that uses a simple SKILL.md file format to give AI agents modular, progressively loaded... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/agent-skills-progressive-disclosure-as-a-system-design-pattern-nanbjcqsc og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/nanBjCqsc.png og:image:alt: Agent Skills: Progressive Disclosure as a System Design Pattern og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Agent Skills: Progressive Disclosure as a System Design Pattern **[SwirlAI](https://daily.dev/sources/swirlai)** · 10 min read · 24 upvotes · 2 comments ## Summary Agent Skills is an open standard released by Anthropic in December 2025 that uses a simple SKILL.md file format to give AI agents modular, progressively loaded capabilities. The format applies the progressive disclosure design pattern to agent context management: at startup only skill names and descriptions are loaded (~80 tokens each), full instructions are activated when relevant, and supporting scripts/docs are pulled in only during execution. This three-tier architecture solves the context window degradation problem ('lost-in-the-middle') while making agent behavior configurable by non-technical users. OpenAI, Google, GitHub Copilot, and Cursor all adopted the standard within weeks of its release. The pattern generalizes beyond coding agents to any system needing broad capability with focused execution, and AI Engineers building non-coding agents must implement the same discovery-activation-execution pipeline themselves. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community discussion Top comments from developers on daily.dev. **@sanjeevbhandari01** · 0 upvotes > nice read ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [What are Agent Skills and How Agents Use Them?](https://daily.dev/posts/what-are-agent-skills-and-how-agents-use-them--vtr9wikon) · Daily Dose of Data Science \| Avi Chawla \| Substack · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [Agent Skills](https://daily.dev/posts/agent-skills-oiotdzetc) · Hacker News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Agent Skills explained: Replacing AGENTS.md with reusable AI knowledge](https://daily.dev/posts/agent-skills-explained-replacing-agents-md-with-reusable-ai-knowledge-4lgrqdva9) · SwiftLee · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#ai-agents](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-agents), [#claude-code](https://daily.dev/tags/claude-code), [#context-engineering](https://daily.dev/tags/context-engineering), [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/agent-skills-progressive-disclosure-as-a-system-design-pattern-nanbjcqsc) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Agent Skills: Progressive Disclosure as a System Design Pattern","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/agent-skills-progressive-disclosure-as-a-system-design-pattern-nanbjcqsc","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/agent-skills-progressive-disclosure-as-a-system-design-pattern-nanbjcqsc"},"datePublished":"2026-03-11T10:39:58.444Z","dateModified":"2026-04-23T02:13:29.228Z","description":"Agent Skills is an open standard released by Anthropic in December 2025 that uses a simple SKILL.md file format to give AI agents modular, progressively loaded...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/a8194a93654f7825d433421323bec96a?_a=AQAEuop","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/a8194a93654f7825d433421323bec96a?_a=AQAEuop","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"SwirlAI","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"SwirlAI","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/25542e29104c4f78b56442780718f69a","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/swirlai"},"commentCount":2,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/agent-skills-progressive-disclosure-as-a-system-design-pattern-nanbjcqsc","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":24},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":2}],"keywords":"ai-agents,claude-code,context-engineering,llm","timeRequired":"PT10M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"SwirlAI","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/swirlai"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Agent Skills: Progressive Disclosure as a System Design Pattern"}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/agent-skills-progressive-disclosure-as-a-system-design-pattern-nanbjcqsc","comment":[{"@type":"Comment","text":"nice read","datePublished":"2026-03-19T03:23:58.606Z","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/nanBjCqsc#c-Qx4yZRYtv","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"sanjeev-bhandari01","url":"https://daily.dev/sanjeevbhandari01","image":"https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/a/ACg8ocJ9o3_4d38t9azYNq1lIqbnv7vBkaYj2nbxeKdT8Wp03DuFYGcv=s96-c"}}]} ```