Back to Events
Skills.md from Scratch: Build a Skill-Driven Coding Agent
Completed

Skills.md from Scratch: Build a Skill-Driven Coding Agent

January 16, 2026, 01:00 Europe/Berlin
Alexey Grigorev
ai-agents llm-engineering agent-systems tooling-architecture

Continue with the workshop writeup

Open the canonical pages, recording, materials, and code repo.

View workshop writeup

A newer, combined version of this workshop is available: Coding Agent with Skills.

We start from the coding agent from the prerequisite workshop and turn it into a general-purpose coding agent with two reusable behavior layers: skills and slash commands. Skills are loaded by the agent when the user's request matches a skill description. Commands are invoked by the user with a leading slash and rendered into prompts before the agent acts.

Links

External resources for this workshop:

The agent you will build

The final workshop system looks like this:

flowchart LR USER["User"] RUNNER["ToyAIKit runner<br/>OpenAI Responses"] LLM["OpenAI model"] CODETOOLS["Coding tools<br/>read, write, tree, bash, search"] SKILLTOOL["skill(name) tool"] LOADER["SkillLoader"] SKILLS["skills/*/SKILL.md<br/>scripts and templates"] COMMANDS["commands/*.md"] COMMANDTOOL["execute_command(name, args)"] USER -->|plain request| RUNNER USER -->|/command| RUNNER RUNNER --> LLM RUNNER --> CODETOOLS RUNNER --> SKILLTOOL SKILLTOOL --> LOADER LOADER --> SKILLS RUNNER --> COMMANDTOOL COMMANDTOOL --> COMMANDS

The project stays small enough to understand in a notebook, but it mirrors the pieces used by real coding agents. The coding tools let the model read, write, search, and run commands. The skill loader turns SKILL.md files with YAML frontmatter into tool-loadable instructions. The command loader turns markdown files like review.md or test.md into reusable prompt templates.