Skills | OpenCode School

Skills are reusable instruction sets that make your AI agent smarter at specific tasks. When you install a skill, OpenCode learns how to do something it didn’t know before — whether that’s building on a specific platform, running AI models, or following design best practices.

The format was created by Anthropic and has since become an open standard maintained at agentskills.io. It’s supported by 40+ AI tools including Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Cursor, and Windsurf — so skills you install work across all of them.

How skills work

A skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md file. At minimum that file has a name, a description, and instructions for the agent to follow. Skills can also bundle scripts, reference documentation, templates, and other assets:

my-skill/
├── SKILL.md       # required: name, description, instructions
├── scripts/       # optional: executable code
├── references/    # optional: docs and specs
└── assets/        # optional: templates and data

Agents use skills in two ways:

Automatically — when your request matches a skill’s description, the agent loads and applies it without you asking
Manually — you can invoke a skill by name yourself, e.g. “Use the replicate skill to find a good image generation model”

Skills use progressive disclosure to stay efficient: at startup, OpenCode only loads the name and description of each skill — just enough to know when to use it. The full instructions are loaded on demand.

Install with `npx skills`

The best way to install skills is with the skills CLI. It installs to all your AI tools at once — OpenCode, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and more — from a single command.

You’ll need Node.js installed to run npx skills. If you don’t have it, ask OpenCode to help you install it for your operating system.

Install four skills

Run these four commands to install a useful set of global skills:

Cloudflare — skills for building on Workers, AI, KV, R2, D1, and the broader Cloudflare platform:

npx skills add https://github.com/cloudflare/skills

Replicate — skills for discovering, comparing, and running AI models via Replicate’s API:

npx skills add replicate/skills

frontend-design — UI/UX design patterns and front-end best practices from Anthropic:

npx skills add https://github.com/anthropics/skills --skill frontend-design

skill-creator — create, test, and improve your own skills from any workflow you want to make repeatable:

npx skills add https://github.com/anthropics/skills --skill skill-creator

Run each command in your terminal. The CLI will detect which AI tools you have installed and set everything up.

Restart OpenCode

Skills are loaded when OpenCode starts. Quit and reopen OpenCode to pick up the newly installed skills. You can verify they loaded by prompting “list installed skills”. Then use the prompt below to continue.

Create your own skills

The skill-creator you just installed lets you turn any workflow into a reusable skill. After completing some process and wanting to make it repeatable, just tell OpenCode:

That worked! Let’s create a global skill for it.

Or if it’s something specific to one project:

That worked! I don’t want to have to repeat myself, so let’s create a project skill for this task.

Global skills live in ~/.config/opencode/skills/ and apply to every project. Project skills live in .opencode/skills/ within a project directory and only apply within that project.

Find more skills

skills.sh is a directory of available skill collections. Browse it to find skills for the tools and workflows you use.