AI-Assisted Java Application Development with Agent Skills | The IntelliJ IDEA Blog

Agent Skills, an open standard introduced by Anthropic, enhances AI agent capabilities by providing specialized knowledge and workflows through skills, which are essentially folders containing a SKILL.md file with instructions and metadata. This concept addresses the challenges of token consumption and effectiveness degradation by progressively managing context, loading only the necessary information when required, rather than all at once. A practical application is demonstrated with Spring Data JPA, where a skill helps prevent common mistakes such as the N+1 SELECT issue and in-memory pagination by providing coding guidelines and examples. Skills can be used with various AI agents like Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, and JetBrains Junie, facilitating better adherence to coding standards and improving performance by automatically integrating and applying these guidelines in software development workflows.