Agent Skill
An agent skill is packaged, reusable expertise an AI assistant loads for a specific job—accessibility audit, PRD draft, Figma handoff—without the user rewriting instructions each time.
Skills combine prompts, steps, guardrails, and output format into a discoverable unit teams install, version, and invoke from the composer or slash commands.
What it means
A skill defines when to activate, what context to gather, how to execute, and what “done” looks like; the agent reads it at runtime (often from a SKILL.md file).
Why designers should care
Skills turn tribal prompt knowledge into durable workflow assets. Designers should own or co-own skills for critique, research synthesis, and design-system compliance.
Example
A UX team publishes a Usability Testing skill; invoking /usability-test in Cursor loads interview guides, synthesis schema, and report template in one run.
Common mistakes
- • Skills so generic they behave like a short system prompt with no steps.
- • No discovery path—users must know the exact slash command.
- • Skills duplicated across repos with no shared library or version.