From Skills to Agents: Bridging Claude Skills and AGENTS.md

tl;dr: skills-to-agents automatically compiles SKILL.md into AGENTS.md. Run it as a GitHub action with a step: uses: dave1010/skills-to-agents@v1.

Coding agents benefit from custom instructions and tools. The standard way to do this now is with an AGENTS.md file and MCP servers. You can quickly add dozens of useful MCP servers. But filling an LLM's context with all this information, when it isn’t always relevant, just adds noise and leaves the agent with less space to work on the actual problem.

Where it all came from

In 2023, I made a coding agent called Pandora that worked around this with a top-level the-guide.txt, given to the LLM along with an index of other guide files. These guides could be dropped in or even symlinked from elsewhere. The code for this was terrible: worse than what you’d get from vibe coding with an agent today. But it worked! The guide system improved the agent substantially, but since it was early GPT-4 era, it was still less capable than coding agents in 2025.

In October 2025, Anthropic introduced Claude Skills, which aim to solve pretty much the same issues. Anthropic’s solution is similar to Pandora but much better thought-through and robust. Instead of plain text guides, Anthropic went with SKILL.md files. These Markdown files have front matter for metadata and live in their own directories, which means they can also include scripts or data. Claude Code does some magic to parse these files, giving the agent just enough information to use them.

Claude also has tooling for managing Skills, making it easy to publish and reuse them across projects and teams. A popular collection is Superpowers, which includes skills for things like TDD and git work trees.

What about other coding agents?

As Simon Willison says, Claude Skills are awesome. I agree but theyre not so useful at the moment, as they only work with Claude. There are open requests for SKILL.md support in other agents, such as Codex CLI and Gemini CLI. Wouldn’t it be great if Skills worked with any coding agent, without needing official support?

`skills-to-agents`

Having built Pandora, I knew it would be easy to compile Skills into a top-level AGENTS.md file. I did this manually as a proof of concept. Knowing it would work, I built Skills to Agents, which automates keeping AGENTS.md in sync with your Skills.

The tool:

Looks for .skills/*/SKILL.md files
Parses the Markdown front matter
Compiles the data with a short preamble explaining Skills
Writes the data to AGENTS.md inside a <skills>…</skills> block

I’ve also published it as an Action on the GitHub Marketplace, making it easy to use in any repo. Just add a .github/workflows/update-agents-skills.yml file:

name: Update AGENTS skills list

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
    paths:
      - '.skills/**'
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  update-agents-skills:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions:
      contents: write
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: dave1010/skills-to-agents@v1
      - uses: stefanzweifel/git-auto-commit-action@v5
        with:
          commit_message: 'chore: sync AGENTS skills list'
          file_pattern: AGENTS.md

You can see a working example in dave1010/tools, with the generated AGENTS.md and the list of skills. Feel free to copy my meta Skill writing skill to get started.

Bigger picture

Since releasing skills-to-agents, I’ve seen related work like list-skills (released two days ago), which does something similar but tells the agent to run a command to list Skills. The more dynamic approach great for managing lots of tools but I prefer having a static list ready from the start. My approach also works for agents without code-execution privileges.

As with ideas that quickly became conventions (like AGENTS.md and MCP), I expect most coding agents will soon support Skills out of the box. For now, skills-to-agents is a simple and effective way to fill the gap. Give it a go and let ke know how you get on.