Skills are modular, self-contained packages that extend agent capabilities by providing specialized knowledge, workflows, and tools. Think of them as "onboarding guides" for specific domains or tasks—they transform a general-purpose agent into a specialized agent equipped with procedural knowledge and domain expertise.
In deepagents CLI, skills are stored in /.deepagents/ /skills/ where is your agent configuration name (default is agent). For example, with the default configuration, skills live at:
The context window is a public good. Skills share the context window with everything else the agent needs: system prompt, conversation history, other Skills' metadata, and the actual user request.
Guide for creating effective skills that extend agent capabilities with specialized knowledge, workflows, or tool integrations. Use this skill when the user asks to: create a skill, make a skill, build a skill, set up a skill, initialize a skill, scaffold a skill, update or modify an existing skill, validate a skill, learn about skill structure, understand how skills work, or get guidance on skill design patterns. Source: langchain-ai/deepagentsjs.