Skip to content

Agent Skills

fast-agent supports Agent Skills, and looks for them in either the .fast-agent/skills or .claude/skills folder.

When valid SKILL.md files are found:

  • The Agent is given access to an execute tool for running shell commands, with the working directory set to the skills folder.
  • Skill descriptions from the manifest and path are added to the System Prompt using the {{agentSkills}} expansion. A warning is displayed if this is not present in the System Prompt.
  • The /skills command lists the available skills.

Command Line Options

If using fast-agent interactively from the command line, the --skills <directory> switch can be used to specify the location of SKILL.md files.

# Specify a skills folder and a model
fast-agent --skills ~/skill-development/testing/ --model gpt-5-mini.low

# Give fast-agent access to the shell 
fast-agent -x

Programmatic Usage

Skills directories can be defined on a per-agent basis:

# Define the agent
@fast.agent(instruction=default_instruction,skills=["~/source/skills"])
async def main():
    # use the --model command line switch or agent arguments to change model
    async with fast.run() as agent:
        await agent.interactive()

This allows each individual agent to use a different set of skills if needed.