Agent Skill

Agent skill is an approach proposed by Anthropic to improve agent capabilities on specific tasks.

AgentScope provides built-in support for Agent Skills through the Toolkit class, allowing users to easily register and manage agent skills.

The related APIs are as follows:

Agent skill API in Toolkit class

API	Description
register_agent_skill	Register agent skills from a given directory.
remove_agent_skill	Remove a registered agent skill by name.
get_agent_skill_prompt	Get the prompt for all registered agent skills, which can be attached to the system prompt for the agent.

In this section we demonstrate how to register agent skills and use them in an ReAct agent.

import os

from agentscope.agent import ReActAgent
from agentscope.formatter import DashScopeChatFormatter
from agentscope.memory import InMemoryMemory
from agentscope.model import DashScopeChatModel
from agentscope.tool import Toolkit

Registering Agent Skills

First, we need to prepare an agent skill directory, which follows the requirements specified in the Anthropic blog.

Note

The skill directory must contain a SKILL.md file containing YAML frontmatter and instructions.

Here, we fake an example skill directory sample_skill with the following files:

---
name: sample_skill
description: A sample agent skill for demonstration.
---

# Sample Skill
...

os.makedirs("sample_skill", exist_ok=True)
with open("sample_skill/SKILL.md", "w", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    f.write(
        """---
name: sample_skill
description: A sample agent skill for demonstration.
---

# Sample Skill
...
""",
    )

Then, we can register the skill using the register_agent_skill API of the Toolkit class.

toolkit = Toolkit()

toolkit.register_agent_skill("sample_skill")

After that, we can get the prompt for all registered agent skills using the get_agent_skill_prompt API

agent_skill_prompt = toolkit.get_agent_skill_prompt()
print("Agent Skill Prompt:")
print(agent_skill_prompt)

Agent Skill Prompt:
# Agent Skills
The agent skills are a collection of folds of instructions, scripts, and resources that you can load dynamically to improve performance on specialized tasks. Each agent skill has a `SKILL.md` file in its folder that describes how to use the skill. If you want to use a skill, you MUST read its `SKILL.md` file carefully.
## sample_skill
A sample agent skill for demonstration.
Check "sample_skill/SKILL.md" for how to use this skill

Of course, we can customize the prompt template when creating the Toolkit instance.

toolkit = Toolkit(
    # The instruction that introduces how to use the skill to the agent/llm
    agent_skill_instruction="<system-info>You're provided a collection of skills, each in a directory and described by a SKILL.md file.</system-info>\n",
    # The template for formatting each skill's prompt, must contain
    # {name}, {description}, and {dir} fields
    agent_skill_template="- {name}({dir}): {description}",
)

toolkit.register_agent_skill("sample_skill")
agent_skill_prompt = toolkit.get_agent_skill_prompt()
print("Customized Agent Skill Prompt:")
print(agent_skill_prompt)

Customized Agent Skill Prompt:
<system-info>You're provided a collection of skills, each in a directory and described by a SKILL.md file.</system-info>

- sample_skill(sample_skill): A sample agent skill for demonstration.

Integrating Agent Skills with ReActAgent

The ReActAgent class in AgentScope will attach the agent skill prompt to the system prompt automatically.

We can create a ReAct agent with the registered agent skills as follows:

Important

When using agent skills, the agent must be equipped with text file reading or shell command tools to access the skill instructions in SKILL.md files.

agent = ReActAgent(
    name="Friday",
    sys_prompt="You are a helpful assistant named Friday.",
    model=DashScopeChatModel(
        model_name="qwen3-max",
        api_key=os.environ["DASHSCOPE_API_KEY"],
    ),
    memory=InMemoryMemory(),
    formatter=DashScopeChatFormatter(),
    toolkit=toolkit,
)

print("Agent's System Prompt with Agent Skills:")
print(agent.sys_prompt)

Agent's System Prompt with Agent Skills:
You are a helpful assistant named Friday.

<system-info>You're provided a collection of skills, each in a directory and described by a SKILL.md file.</system-info>

- sample_skill(sample_skill): A sample agent skill for demonstration.