Agent Skill in VS Code

Introduction

Agent Skill is a collection of MD files, scripts, examples, and test scenarios that your Agent can use to perform specialised tasks. Think of them like a set of instructions.

Originally, Agent Skill was a standard used solely by Anthropic Models/Agents. Now it's an open standard, much like MCP. For more information, you can check out agentskills.io.

And now, it is adopted by several editors/CLIs, and in this post, I would like to explore using it with Visual Studio Code (insider version).

Give it a try

Make sure you have Visual Studio Insiders 1.107 or higher. Then you can go to Preferences -> Settings -> Find Anthropic Agent Skills, then you should see as below (check Use Agent Skills):

Step 1: Create a calculator utility's Agent Skill

Then, I would like to extract add/subtract/multiply/divide operators to a Python script to demonstrate the agent's ability to detect and call the script.

All the source code can be found at

thangchung / agent-skill-experiment

Anthropic Agent Skill experiment

You can check out the calculator-utils/SKILL.md, and the calculator-utils/scripts/calculator.py

Step 2: Discover the calculator utility's Agent Skill

I type the prompt give me the results of ((1*6.5/2)+(10-12))/4?. It will know that I want to do some kind of calculator, then VSCode will discover the appropriate agent skill (in this case is calculator utils at .github/skills):

Step 3: Execute the script based on the SKILL.md guidance

Each execution step will divide the complex calculation into a simple one, and call the Python script to execute it as follows:

How many editor/CLI supports?

Currently, Claude, VS Code + GitHub Copilot, Codex CLI, Amp, and Factory already support Anthropic Agent Skill natively. Look at the picture below from
Eleanor Berger twit

Happy hacking!