Support for "Skills"

[tobias-walle]

Yesterday Claude Code released a new feature called "Skills", that basically allows the user to define prompts, that are lazily loaded by the Agent when needed.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/skills

It would be nice to see a similar feature in OpenCode.

[github-actions]

This issue might be a duplicate of existing issues. Please check:

• Dynamic system prompts for custom agents #3195: Dynamic system prompts for custom agents - discusses dynamically generating system prompts that can be lazily loaded, which is conceptually similar to the Skills feature for loading prompts when needed
• status messages and logging need work #12: Custom system prompt - requests custom system prompt functionality

Feel free to ignore if none of these address your specific case.

[tobias-walle]

This issue might be a duplicate of existing issues. Please check:

• Dynamic system prompts for custom agents #3195: Dynamic system prompts for custom agents - discusses dynamically generating system prompts that can be lazily loaded, which is conceptually similar to the Skills feature for loading prompts when needed
• status messages and logging need work #12: Custom system prompt - requests custom system prompt functionality

Feel free to ignore if none of these address your specific case.

1. Not a duplicate, as this issue is refereeing to handling dynamic content in the system prompt (by running scripts), but these are always included. With skills the agent decides then it wants to include a specific "Skill".

2. Also not a duplicate

[rekram1-node]

Sorry about that @tobias-walle the bot is a little overeager, I think ill make it reword it's comments so that people know they dont need to respond to it.

Every issue opened is seen by someone on the team but the bot helps find duplicates (sometimes haha)

[tobias-walle]

No worries 😄 As I wasn't entirely sure about the first one, I checked and just wanted to share my findings.

Overall, I really like the bot, as it gives me some confidence that my issue is actually unique and that I didn't miss a duplicate.

[kziemski]

Adding more to this as this guy has some interesting ideas on extensions to skills:
https://github.com/obra/superpowers
https://github.com/obra/superpowers-skills
https://blog.fsck.com/2025/10/09/superpowers/

[rekram1-node]

I think everything skills offers is already possible right, or at least most of it, just define a custom tool and return markdown from it

I mean that's like 99% of it I think

[kziemski]

I think everything skills offers is already possible right, or at least most of it, just define a custom tool and return markdown from it

I mean that's like 99% of it I think

ya that's not surprising i'm just wondering if it could be the starting point for more in opencode.
the skill sharing in the superpowers repo could be interesting.

[malhashemi]

Hey everyone! 👋

I just published an npm plugin that implements Anthropic's Skills Specification for OpenCode!

📦 npm package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/opencode-skills
📄 GitHub repo: https://github.com/malhashemi/opencode-skills

Installation (super simple!)

Add one line to your opencode.json or ~/.config/opencode/opencode.json:

{
  "plugin": ["opencode-skills"]
}

That's it! OpenCode will automatically install the plugin from npm on next startup. No npm install needed.

What it does

This plugin provides one-to-one parity with Anthropic's Agent Skills Specification (v1.0), with the added bonus of supporting nested skills (e.g., skills/tools/analyzer/SKILL.md → skills_tools_analyzer) - a feature that Anthropic doesn't support yet.

How it works

The plugin scans your .opencode/skills/ directory (and ~/.opencode/skills/ for global skills), discovers all SKILL.md files, validates them against the spec, and exposes SKILL.md using its meta data as a callable tool (e.g., skills_my_skill). I'm assuming Claude Code implements this similarly, though I could be wrong here and something fancier is running under the hood

Quick Start

1. Add plugin to opencode.json (see above)
2. Restart OpenCode
3. Create a skill:

mkdir -p .opencode/skills/my-skill

4. Add a SKILL.md file:

---
name: my-skill
description: A custom skill that helps with specific tasks
---

# My Skill

Your skill instructions here...

5. Restart OpenCode again - your skill is now available as skills_my_skill!

Integration with OpenCode

Since skills are just regular OpenCode tools, they benefit from OpenCode's existing tool management:

• ✅ Can be disabled globally via opencode.json
• ✅ Can be enabled/disabled per-agent in agent frontmatter
• ✅ Inherit all of OpenCode's permission system

Testing

I've tested this with Anthropic's official skills on Claude Sonnet 4.5 with max thinking, and they work beautifully. You may notice that the tool call return some instructions to the LLM about path management, I found that without it the agent gets lost searching for files mentioned in the SKILLS.md.

Note on Tool Restrictions

One difference from Anthropic's implementation: I couldn't find a way to implement skill-level tool restrictions (the allowed-tools field that's available in Claude Code). However, I don't think this is necessary in OpenCode since you'll typically pair skills with specific agents, and agents already have their own fine-grained tool permissions. This actually gives you more control - you can configure which tools are available at the agent level rather than embedding it in the skill itself.

---

Hope this helps the community! Let me know if anyone has feedback or suggestions. 🎉

For full documentation, check out the GitHub repo.

Feel free to PR if you have some valuable improvements

---

@thdxr and @rekram1-node , I believe you mentioned you are going to work on revamping the custom tools in the upcoming TUI. Should I expect a breaking change?

[ihabwahbi]

@malhashemi I'll test your solution seems a very straightforward and easy way to integrate Skills into opencode

[rekram1-node]

@malhashemi I dont think there should be any breaking changes soon, but if you run into any issues just lmk.

We do version things with specific version bumps if breaking tho

[tobias-walle]

Great idea with the plugin! I think this is already quite a good solution.

I think an official solution would still be valuable to have a common standard, but this doesn't has much priority (considering the big refactoring you are currently working on)

[kziemski]

@tobias-walle @malhashemi @rekram1-node
I'm wondering if you guys had taken a look at what this guy had done on the CC side https://blog.fsck.com/2025/10/09/superpowers/

i'm wondering if opencode taking the approach of public skills repo or taking the approach of openweb-ui's public search for prompts,functions ie for community sharing would be something that could really bring some adoption for an official version of skills support

[rekram1-node]

i think we are going to watch them play out a little more before doing anything major, we have some higher priority items currently to tackle but thanks for the callout

[ferdinandyb]

@malhashemi Can you version-pin the plugin somehow?