---
type: claim
domain: ai-alignment
secondary_domains: [grand-strategy, collective-intelligence]
description: "Anthropic's SKILL.md format (December 2025) has been adopted by 6+ major platforms including confirmed integrations in Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, and Cursor, with a SkillsMP marketplace — this is Taylor's instruction card as an open industry standard"
confidence: experimental
source: "Anthropic Agent Skills announcement (Dec 2025); The New Stack, VentureBeat, Unite.AI coverage of platform adoption; arXiv 2602.12430 (Agent Skills architecture paper); SkillsMP marketplace documentation"
created: 2026-04-04
depends_on:
  - "attractor-agentic-taylorism"
---

# Agent skill specifications have become an industrial standard for knowledge codification with major platform adoption creating the infrastructure layer for systematic conversion of human expertise into portable AI-consumable formats

The abstract mechanism described in the Agentic Taylorism claim — humanity feeding knowledge into AI through usage — now has a concrete industrial instantiation. Anthropic's Agent Skills specification (SKILL.md), released December 2025, defines a portable file format for encoding "domain-specific expertise: workflows, context, and best practices" into files that AI agents consume at runtime.

## The infrastructure layer

The SKILL.md format encodes three types of knowledge:
1. **Procedural knowledge** — step-by-step workflows for specific tasks (code review, data analysis, content creation)
2. **Contextual knowledge** — domain conventions, organizational preferences, quality standards
3. **Conditional knowledge** — when to apply which procedure, edge case handling, exception rules

This is structurally identical to Taylor's instruction card system: observe how experts perform tasks → codify the knowledge into standardized formats → deploy through systems that can execute without the original experts.

## Platform adoption

The specification has been adopted by multiple AI development platforms within months of release. Confirmed shipped integrations:
- **Claude Code** (Anthropic) — native SKILL.md support as the primary skill format
- **GitHub Copilot** — workspace skills using compatible format
- **Cursor** — IDE-level skill integration

Announced or partially integrated (adoption depth unverified):
- **Microsoft** — Copilot agent framework integration announced
- **OpenAI** — GPT actions incorporate skills-compatible formats
- **Atlassian, Figma** — workflow and design process skills announced

A **SkillsMP marketplace** has emerged where organizations publish and distribute codified expertise as portable skill packages. Partner skills from Canva, Stripe, Notion, and Zapier encode domain-specific knowledge into consumable formats, though the depth of integration varies across partners.

## What this means structurally

The existence of this infrastructure transforms Agentic Taylorism from a theoretical pattern into a deployed industrial system. The key structural features:

1. **Portability** — skills transfer between platforms, creating a common format for codified expertise (analogous to how Taylor's instruction cards could be carried between factories)
2. **Marketplace dynamics** — the SkillsMP creates a market for codified knowledge, with pricing, distribution, and competition dynamics
3. **Organizational adoption** — companies that encode their domain expertise into skill files make that knowledge portable, extractable, and deployable without the original experts
4. **Cumulative codification** — each skill file builds on previous ones, creating an expanding library of codified human expertise

## Challenges

The SKILL.md format encodes procedural and conditional knowledge but the depth of metis captured is unclear. Simple skills (file formatting, API calling patterns) may transfer completely. Complex skills (strategic judgment, creative direction, ethical reasoning) may lose essential contextual knowledge in translation. The adoption data shows breadth of deployment but not depth of knowledge capture.

The marketplace dynamics could drive toward either concentration (dominant platforms control the skill library) or distribution (open standards enable a commons of codified expertise). The outcome depends on infrastructure openness — whether skill portability is genuine or creates vendor lock-in.

The rapid adoption timeline (months, not years) may reflect low barriers to creating skill files rather than high value from using them. Many published skills may be shallow procedural wrappers rather than genuine expertise codification.

## Additional Evidence (supporting)

**Hermes Agent (Nous Research)** — the largest open-source agent framework (26K+ GitHub stars, 262 contributors) has native agentskills.io compatibility. Skills are stored as markdown files in `~/.hermes/skills/` and auto-created after 5+ tool calls on similar tasks, error recovery patterns, or user corrections. 40+ bundled skills ship with the framework. A Community Skills Hub enables sharing and discovery. This represents the open-source ecosystem converging on the same codification standard — not just commercial platforms but the largest community-driven framework independently adopting the same format. The auto-creation mechanism is structurally identical to Taylor's observation step: the system watches work being done and extracts the pattern into a reusable instruction card without explicit human design effort.

---

Relevant Notes:
- [[attractor-agentic-taylorism]] — the mechanism this infrastructure instantiates: knowledge extraction from humans into AI-consumable systems as byproduct of usage
- [[knowledge codification into AI agent skills structurally loses metis because the tacit contextual judgment that makes expertise valuable cannot survive translation into explicit procedural rules]] — what the codification process loses: the contextual judgment that Taylor's instruction cards also failed to capture

Topics:
- [[_map]]
