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

January 16, 2026 Alexey Grigorev
AI Agents LLM Engineering Agent Systems Tooling Architecture
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A newer, combined version of this workshop is available: Coding Agent with Skills.

We start from the coding agent in the prerequisite workshop. We turn it into a general-purpose coding agent with two reusable ways to add behavior: skills and slash commands. The agent loads a skill when your request matches its description. You invoke a command with a leading slash, and the system turns it into a prompt before the agent acts.

External resources for this workshop:

The agent you will build

By the end you'll have built a system that looks like this:

The runner reaches one OpenAI model and the coding tools directly, loads SKILL.md files through the skill tool, and expands slash commands from markdown templates.

The project stays small enough to understand in a notebook, but it has the same pieces as 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 instructions the agent can load with a tool. The command loader turns markdown files like review.md or test.md into reusable prompt templates.

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Tutorial pages

  1. Overview and setup
  2. Part 1: Demoing skills and commands
  3. Part 2: Recapping the coding agent
  4. Part 3: Building the base runner
  5. Part 4: Defining the skill format
  6. Part 5: Loading `SKILL.md`
  7. Part 6: The skill tool and prompt injection
  8. Part 7: Implementing commands
  9. Part 8: The fuller prototype
  10. Q&A: skills and commands
  11. Deferred items
  12. Appendix: workshop files

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