Agent Skills: Claude Code, Cursor and MCP in Practice

Typing prompts and hoping for the best is no longer enough. The developers getting real leverage from Claude Code, Cursor, and other AI coding tools in 2026 are the ones who have learned how to teach their AI — not just talk to it.

Agent skills are the mechanism that makes this possible. They are portable, reusable instruction packages that transform a general-purpose AI assistant into a specialist that knows your project structure, follows your team's conventions, can generate a polished PowerPoint or fill a PDF form on demand, and can reach out to external services via the Model Context Protocol without you writing a single prompt from scratch.

In just five months — from October 2025 to March 2026 — the agent skills ecosystem went from zero to over 350,000 published skills, with Anthropic's official repository alone reaching nearly 100,000 GitHub stars. This is not a niche topic. This is the new foundation of professional AI-assisted development.

This course puts you ahead of that curve — fast.

What this course covers

You will master three interconnected ecosystems that work together to supercharge your AI coding workflow:

Claude Code Skills — the SKILL md format

You'll learn how the SKILL md format works from the ground up: the YAML frontmatter fields that control when and how a skill is triggered, the progressive disclosure architecture that keeps your context window lean even when dozens of skills are installed, and the three skill architecture patterns — Pure Markdown for lightweight guidance, Scripts + Markdown for deterministic processing, and MCP Integration for multi-service orchestration.

You'll build a commit message skill, a code review skill, and a document generation skill — then publish your own skill to a public GitHub repository and list it on the skills sh marketplace.

Cursor Rules and Skills — the MDC format

Cursor's rule system has matured significantly. You'll understand the four rule types — Always, Auto-Attached, Agent-Requested, and Manual — and when to use each. You'll write rules in the modern MDC format with glob patterns and YAML frontmatter, and you'll understand why the description field is the single most important thing you can write in any rule.

You'll explore the community's most popular rule patterns — from the 'tech stack declaration' pattern found in nearly every top-rated rule, to 'anti-pattern' prohibitions that are more reliable than positive instructions, to code example blocks that show rather than tell. You'll also install and inspect a plugin from the official Cursor Marketplace, understanding how rules, skills, and MCP configurations bundle together into a single installable package.

MCP Tools — the action layer

You'll build a real MCP server in Python using FastMCP in about 30 lines of code, test it with the MCP Inspector, and connect it to both Claude Code and Cursor. You'll understand the three MCP primitives — Tools, Resources, and Prompts — and how to choose the right transport protocol (STDIO for local, Streamable HTTP for remote). By the end, you'll be able to navigate the major MCP registries (mcp so, Smithery, PulseMCP) and evaluate servers before adding them to your workflow.

A thriving ecosystem — and how to navigate it safely

350,000+ skills, 18,000+ MCP servers, and a growing number of marketplaces mean you have incredible resources available. But a security study found that roughly 5% of analyzed community skills showed patterns suggesting malicious intent — prompt injection, credential leakage, or unwanted side effects.

You'll learn a practical framework for evaluating any third-party skill or MCP server before you install it. You'll understand which signals to look for in a SKILL md file, how to use Snyk scanning on skills sh, and how to apply the principle of least privilege when configuring allowed-tools in your own skills.

Practical by design — every lecture produces something real

This is a 2-hour course, and every minute counts. There are 13 lectures across 4 sections. Each one ends with a hands-on deliverable you actually keep — a skill you can use tomorrow, a rule set you can commit to your repo, an MCP server you can share with your team.

By the final lecture, you'll have assembled a complete personal skills toolkit: an AGENTS md context file, a Cursor rules library, a set of Claude Code skills, and at least one MCP server — all organized in a GitHub repository you can clone into any new project in seconds.

One skill format, many tools

The SKILL md open standard (formalized in December 2025) works across Claude Code, Cursor, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, Windsurf, Roo Code, and more than a dozen other AI coding assistants. The skills you build in this course are not tied to a single tool. They travel with you.

AGENTS md — the cross-tool context file — is also covered in depth, giving you a single file that works as a baseline context layer across every major AI IDE without any modifications.

Is this course right for you?

You'll get the most from this course if you already use Claude Code or Cursor in your day-to-day work and feel like you're leaving capability on the table. You don't need to be an expert — you just need to be comfortable in a terminal and have written at least a few hundred lines of code in any language.

The MCP section uses Python and TypeScript examples. If you're not a Python or TypeScript developer, you can still follow along — the concepts translate directly to any language with an MCP SDK, which now includes Java, Kotlin, Rust, Go, C#, and Ruby.

Start building skills that compound

Most AI coding advice is ephemeral — write a better prompt today, throw it away tomorrow. Skills are different. A well-written SKILL md file that you put together this week can still be saving you and your team hours every month two years from now. That's the leverage that makes this topic worth learning properly.

Enroll and start building your first skill in the next 30 minutes.