Standards vs Skills

The difference

Standards are declarative—they describe conventions and patterns.

"Our API responses use this format."

Skills are procedural—they describe how to do tasks.

"When creating an API endpoint, follow these steps."

Comparison

Standards

• Type: Conventions, patterns
• Invocation: Explicit (/inject-standards)
• Location: agent-os/standards/

Skills

• Type: Procedures, workflows
• Invocation: Auto-detected by Claude
• Location: .claude/skills/

When to use /inject-standards

• You want explicit control over which conventions apply
• You're doing something that spans multiple domains
• You're building a skill and want to bake in conventions
• You want to see what standards exist for a task

When to rely on skills

• You have a repeatable procedure you want automated
• You want Claude to auto-detect when to apply something
• The task is self-contained

For creating skills, see Claude's official skills documentation.

Converting between them

Convert to skill if:

• The standard describes how to do something (procedure)
• You want it invoked automatically without thinking about it
• It's a complete, self-contained workflow

Keep as standard if:

• It describes conventions only (no procedure)
• You want explicit control over when it's applied
• It's meant to be combined with other standards
• It applies across many different task types

Skills can reference standards

This is often the best approach. A Skill can include:

Before implementing, read:
- agent-os/standards/api/response-format.md
- agent-os/standards/api/error-handling.md

This gives you procedural automation (Skill) with declarative conventions (Standards).

/inject-standards surfaces skills

When you run /inject-standards, it will:

1. Identify and inject relevant standards
2. Mention any relevant Skills that exist

It won't auto-invoke Skills, but surfaces them so you can decide.