Glossary

Agent skills

Agent skills are packaged instruction sets that extend what an AI agent can do for a specific task: a workflow, a domain convention, a tool recipe. In Claude's ecosystem they live as SKILL.md files; other platforms ship comparable units under names like custom instructions, gems, or GPTs.

The management problem

Skills multiply faster than any other agent asset because they are shareable and vendor-bundled. A scan of one machine found 3,073 SKILL.md files with 887 distinct contents — bundles, copies, and forks, most of them invisible to the person running the agent.

What good management looks like

Treat skills like dependencies: one canonical version per skill in an inventory, explicit deployment to the machines that need it, and drift detection for local edits.

Related

This entry is part of the untactit glossary. Definitions draw on measured write-ups published on the blog.

All terms

Stop guessing what your agents are running.

Connect one workspace and see every skill, rule, and memory your team has in play — in about ten minutes.

Start free Talk to us

No credit card. Works with what you already run.