What's an Agent Skill?
1 min
Anthropic's open Agent Skill format is a folder with a SKILL.md describing what the skill does. Avery imports it as an editable agent template.
Anthropic published 'Agent Skills' as an open standard in December 2025 — a SKILL.md file with YAML frontmatter (name / description / when_to_use / allowed_tools) plus a Markdown body describing the procedure. Open hosts like Claude Desktop / Code / API / OpenAI Codex CLI / Gemini CLI / Cursor all read them. Avery imports skills into the agent template format: we translate the SKILL.md body into Avery's deterministic agent DSL via a one-time cloud LLM call, then persist a regular Agent you can edit, run, and inspect. Once imported, the agent runs against your local SLM — no live skill-discovery, no runtime dependency on Claude.
Live recipes need the desktop
This article is a static preview. The in-app Help sidecar inside Avery NXR can fire each step against your live project — install the desktop to use it interactively.