Agent Skills in VS Code

The discussion focuses on "agent skills" and their importance for customizing AI agents. Harald Kirschner explains that agent skills are markdown files with descriptions that allow agents to load relevant information dynamically, improving efficiency by only pulling in necessary context. Tim Rogers emphasizes that agent skills help manage the context window more effectively, contrasting them with custom instructions which can "pollute" the context with irrelevant information. They suggest using custom instructions for universally relevant tasks (like coding guidelines) and agent skills for specialist routines or workflows (like CSS design principles). Harald also mentions that agent skills are currently an "Insiders" feature in VS Code, soon to be pulled into the stable version, and demonstrates how to convert existing custom instructions into a skill to avoid "AI slot" in front-end design.