The landscape

A source list: what each project is and where to find it, not a verdict on whether it works. Judgement dates faster than facts, so it lives in the research; this page is the map.

The maintained version, with per-entry read-dates, lives in the repository at docs/knowledge/reference/landscape.md.

The format

• Agent Skills — the format specification. A skill is a directory with SKILL.md, plus optional scripts/, references/, assets/. Requires name and description; no capability or tag field; silent on packaging for every ecosystem.
• Microsoft Agent Framework — a first-party implementation, stated compatible with agentskills.io, with four-stage progressive disclosure.
• skill.md — a converging effort across Cloudflare, agentskills and Vercel, implemented by Mintlify.

Distribution

Everyone agrees on <dir>/<name>/SKILL.md; nobody agrees on the prefix, and archives went unaddressed until recently.

npm / JavaScript — agentskills RFC #81 (a package.json field), antfu/skills-npm (a skills/ directory), vercel-labs/skills (and skills.sh), library-skills.io (.agents/skills/ inside the package), and pnpm RFC #13422 (declare in the manifest instead).

JVM — SkillsJars packages skills inside the jar at META-INF/skills/…; its documentation does not mention Android AAR or Kotlin Multiplatform.

Tool managers — mise #9479, and skilld, whose guidance on scale is to be selective by hand.

Serving and registries

• maven-tools-mcp — an MCP server giving agents Maven Central dependency intelligence, integrating Context7 for documentation retrieval.
• Agentic Resource Discovery — a /.well-known/ai-catalog.json registry at the website, not the artifact.
• SkillRepo / Skilldex (arXiv 2604.16911) — registry and distribution layers from the research side.

Research

• SkillReducer (arXiv 2603.29919) — analyses 55,315 skills; finds 26.4% lack routing descriptions and over 60% of body content is non-actionable, and reports a “less-is-more” effect from compression.

Adjacent

Routinely conflated, but a different problem: AGENTS.md (instructions for the repo you are in, not its dependencies), llms.txt (a website’s documentation index), and Context7 (documentation retrieval by resolved identifier).