Agents Are Learning to Write Their Own SKILL.md Files

The Agent Skills open standard today, and the 2026 research on agents that write their own skills. TL;DR: In late 2025, "Agent Skills" became a thing — a dead-simple way to teach an AI agent a task: a folder with a SKILL.md file (some instructions in Markdown). It's already an open standard. The wild part is what's coming next: agents that write their own skills. I built a demo where an agent solves a task the hard way once, saves a real SKILL.md , and then reuses it — cutting its total effort almost in half. ~130 lines, no API key. First, what's a "skill"? If you've used Claude Code or similar tools lately, you've probably seen SKILL.md files. The idea is refreshingly low-tech. A "skill" is just a folder with a Markdown file that says how to do something : --- name : csv-to-markdown description : Turn comma-separated text into a Markdown table. Use when the input looks like CSV and the user wants a table. --- # CSV to Markdown ## Instructions Split the text into rows on newlines and columns on commas. Make the first row the header, add a `---` divider row, then format every row as `| a | b | c |`. That's it. No SDK, no config. Anthropic introduced this in October 2025 and then published it as an open standard ( agentskills.io ) in December 2025, so the same skill folder now works across ~30+ different agent tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, and more). The full rules are short ( agentskills.io/specification ): the only required fields are name (1–64 chars, lowercase-with-hyphens, and it must match the folder name) and description (≤1024 chars, saying what it does and when to use it ). Everything else — license , metadata , compatibility , allowed-tools — is optional. That's the whole spec. The SKILL.md files my demo writes follow it to the letter, so they'd load unmodified in any compatible CLI. The clever trick: progressive disclosure Here's the smart part. If you just dumped 50 skills' worth of instructions into the agent's context, you'd fill it up and leave n