'Skills' are the new format for coding with agents

For two years, getting the most out of a coding assistant meant writing better prompts. In 2026 that approach ran out of road. The community converged on a different format: the 'skill', an instruction file (usually a CLAUDE.md or a skills directory) that loads into the agent's context and teaches it, reusably, how to tackle a class of task.

The trigger was a single file: Andrej Karpathy's notes on the typical mistakes models make when coding, packaged as a CLAUDE.md. It passed 200,000 stars and made clear that a solid rules document beats any improvised prompt. Collections from engineers like Matt Pocock and Addy Osmani followed, along with entire skills marketplaces for product, marketing and sales.

For a team the lesson is practical: treat agent instructions as code, version them and share them. That is exactly the approach behind our own skills library for SAP and development. The flip side, the security of installing third-party skills, we cover separately.