Agent Skills in Claude Code and Visual Studio Code: Setup, Benefits, Risks, and a Step-by-Step Example
AI coding assistants are useful for one-off questions, but many development tasks are not one-off tasks. A team may follow the same testing procedure before every release, use a specific format for code reviews, or require certain checks whenever a database migration is created. Repeating those requirements in every prompt is inefficient. Putting all of them into a permanent instruction file is not always ideal either, because the assistant may receive irrelevant information for tasks that do not need it. This is the problem that Agent Skills are designed to solve. A skill packages reusable instructions, supporting files, examples, and optional scripts into a folder. Claude Code or GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code can discover that folder and load its contents when the current task matches the skill’s purpose. Both environments support the open Agent Skills format, which makes it possible to share some skills across tools. This guide explains what skills are, how they differ ...