Skills are the New SDKs - Elvin Aghammadzada, DataRobot
Source
AI Engineer
Author
AI Engineer
Date
Terms in this piece · Glossary
MCP — The Model Context Protocol — an open standard that lets any AI assistant plug into any tool or data source without custom integration code.
tool use — A model's ability to call external functions — run code, search the web, edit files — instead of only generating text.
AI agent — An AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.
agent skill — A reusable instruction file that teaches an agent how to do one job well — the procedure, the tools, and what counts as done.
Why it matters
If you ship a developer platform, agents will keep using it wrong until it is teachable. This is a concrete pattern for packaging workflow knowledge as installable, versioned skills that work across the major coding agents.
