Agent Skills: New Value, New Problems

Agent skills are the newest thing I am watching closely, and they are the clearest case yet of a technology that brings real, obvious value and a fresh set of problems in the exact same package. A skill is packaged procedural knowledge — a bundle of instructions, and often some scripts and resources, that teaches an agent how to do a specific job well, portable from one context to another. After spending a lot of this year thinking about MCP as the way an agent reaches capabilities, skills are the way an agent knows how to use them, and that turns out to be a genuinely different and genuinely