Anthropic / skills
Anthropic's "skills" repository is a public collection of example Agent Skills, templates, and the Agent Skills specification designed for use with Claude (Anthropic's conversational agent). Skills are self-contained folders that include a SKILL.md file (YAML frontmatter + instruction content) plus any scripts, assets, or helpers required. The repository demonstrates patterns for creating repeatable, testable behaviors that Claude can load dynamically to improve performance on specialized tasks.
Key contents and highlights:
- Example skills: creative, design, development, enterprise workflows, and document-processing skills that show different instruction patterns and integration techniques.
- Spec and template: a formal Agent Skills specification (in ./spec) and a template skill (./template) to help developers author new skills consistently.
- Document skills: subfolders (skills/docx, skills/pdf, skills/pptx, skills/xlsx) containing the implementations that power Claude's document capabilities; these are source-available references (not fully open-source) intended to help developers build more complex skills.
- Licensing: many example skills are open-sourced under Apache 2.0; some production document skills are source-available with usage guidance in the README.
- Integration examples: explicit instructions and commands for registering the repo as a Claude Code plugin marketplace and for installing skill sets (e.g., /plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills and /plugin install document-skills@anthropic-agent-skills). The README also links to usage docs for Claude.ai and the Claude API Skills Quickstart.
- Disclaimer: the repo is intended for demonstration and educational purposes — real behavior in Claude or production systems may differ and skills should be tested before relying on them for critical tasks.
Use cases:
- Developers and teams building domain-specific behaviors for Claude (branding, company workflows, automated reports, testing, etc.).
- Engineers wanting reference implementations of document-processing workflows to adapt for their own agents.
- Researchers and integrators exploring standard formats for agent-executable skill packages via the Agent Skills spec.
How to get started (high-level):
- Browse the ./skills folders to find pattern examples and a suitable starting point.
- Use the template-skill in ./template to author a new skill, providing YAML frontmatter (name, description) and instruction content.
- Register the repository or install skill packages in Claude Code / Claude.ai or upload via the Claude API following the README and linked Quickstart docs.
Repository metadata (from GitHub):
- Created: 2025-09-22
- Description: Public repository for Agent Skills
- Stars: 25,894 (as recorded in provided context)
- Owner/Author: Anthropic
Where to read more:
- Agent Skills standard: agentskills.io (linked from the README)
- Anthropic engineering post: "Equipping agents for the real world with Agent Skills" (linked in README)
- Claude support docs on what skills are, using skills, and creating custom skills (linked in README)
This repository is particularly valuable if you are building or extending conversational agents (especially Claude) and want a reusable, standardized way to package task-specific instruction sets, tooling, and integrations that agents can load dynamically.
