This article thoroughly examines Anthropic's Claude Skills, positioning them as the future standard for industrial-grade Agents. It defines Claude Skills as a file system-based, reusable knowledge package operating within a sandbox VM, crafted to inject procedural, deterministic Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) into Agents in a standardized manner. Its core components include metadata, instructions, and resources. The article elaborates on how Agents perceive and load Claude Skills through a 'Progressive Disclosure' mechanism, which incrementally loads information on demand, effectively addressing the challenge of excessively large context windows. Furthermore, it analyzes the interplay between Claude Skills and MCP (Open AI Tool Standard), where both collaborate to furnish Agents with specialized domain knowledge and external tools. Finally, the article introduces open-source solutions for implementing Agent Skills and illustrates their application potential with an example of building a smart shopping guide AI assistant.

