6 Skills
This chapter covers
- What skills are and how they relate to tools
- Specifying and using skills according to the Agent Skills open standard
- Enabling our LLM agent to discover, activate, and execute skills
We’ve just seen how to extend the capabilities of our LLM agents using MCP tools. Tools alone, however, are not enough for tasks that require multiple steps and which we want our LLM agent to perform repeatedly, such as fetching information about a book from the web before adding it to our reading list whenever we discover something new and interesting. Rather than re-specifying that procedure each time, we can document the procedure in a “skill”. In this way, skills (i.e. procedures) are defined once, and we can simply tell the LLM agent which skill to use. In this chapter, we’ll learn how to build skills and enable our LLM agent to use them.
Skills, just as with MCP tools, are backed by an open standard. We can create skills by conforming to this standard's specification and build our LLM agent to support their discovery and use. The standard also paves the way for an ecosystem of shareable skills, allowing us to leverage skills created by others in addition to those we create ourselves.
To do this, we’ll define a new core type for our framework, Skill, and update our LLMAgent and TaskHandler classes to implement skill discovery and activation. Figure 6.1 illustrates the work ahead.