What are agent skills?

Agent skills are markdown instruction files that give coding assistants domain-specific knowledge. They follow the open Agent Skills spec and work with tools like Claude Code, OpenCode, OpenAI Codex, and others.

Skills are different from MCP. MCP gives your coding assistant tools to call Replicate’s API. Skills give it knowledge about how to use those tools well: which models to pick, how to structure prompts, what tradeoffs to consider. They work best together.

Replicate’s skills

Replicate publishes a collection of agent skills covering model discovery, comparison, execution, and prompting:

Source code: github.com/replicate/skills

Install

Install all of Replicate’s skills with one command:

npx skills add replicate/skills

This downloads the skill files into your project and registers them with your coding assistant. The skills CLI detects which tools you have installed (Claude Code, OpenCode, etc.) and configures them automatically.

Update and remove

To pull the latest versions of all installed skills:

npx skills update

To remove Replicate’s skills:

npx skills remove replicate

Skills and MCP

Skills and MCP are complementary:

• MCP connects your coding assistant to Replicate’s HTTP API, giving it tools to search for models, create predictions, and fetch results.
• Skills give your coding assistant knowledge about how to use those tools effectively: which models to choose, how to write prompts that get good results, and what parameters to tune.

You don’t need both, but they work well together. With MCP alone, your assistant can call the API but may not know which model to pick or how to prompt it. With skills alone, your assistant has the knowledge but would need you to make API calls manually.