How to Create & Use SKILLS.md in Cursor (2026)

Welcome to this video guys. Let's see

how we can quickly create a skill and use that skill in cursor. Now skills are important because they tell the agent what to do and more importantly what not to do. AI agents can uh do a lot of

to do. AI agents can uh do a lot of stuff. They can call your APIs. Maybe

stuff. They can call your APIs. Maybe

they'll use all your tokens. So it is very important to limit what they do and to guide them on how to achieve a specific target. Okay. So let's just

specific target. Okay. So let's just quickly see how we can do it and we'll have your first skill up and running in a minute. So the first thing is you need

a minute. So the first thing is you need to create a cursor folder. Okay, my bad I just created a directory. Sorry, a

file not a folder. So click this icon new folder and write dot cursor. Inside

this cursor folder we need to create a new folder called skills. Okay. And

finally inside the skills is where you create your skills. Now we need to have a different folder for each skill. For

this example, I'll uh create two skills.

The first one will be to tell the agent how to create an API. And the second one will not be a technical skill. It will

be more like technical writing. So, it

will be a documentation writing skill.

Once you have uh created the folders, inside the skills, let's create a new folder. And let's call it API creation

folder. And let's call it API creation skill. Okay. And inside skills, we'll

skill. Okay. And inside skills, we'll have another skill called documentation creator. And first, let's create this

creator. And first, let's create this skill and then I'll show you how you can create that. Now inside this API

create that. Now inside this API creation skill folder create a new file and call it skill.m MD. Notice the name is skill in capital and MD is in small.

Now this is the standard convention to create your skill files. Inside the

skill file is where we create a skill.

Now there's a specific format to create a skill that is a standard format. It is

how it is written in cloud anti-gravity or any other IDE not just cursor. The

skill.md file is divided into seven sections. Skill name, description,

sections. Skill name, description, instructions, templates, examples and notes. Okay, I think this is six, not

notes. Okay, I think this is six, not seven. And all of these are not

seven. And all of these are not mandatory. The mandatory sections are

mandatory. The mandatory sections are just title, description and instructions. So title is what the skill

instructions. So title is what the skill is called. The description of the skill.

is called. The description of the skill.

Now this is important because the agent needs to know when it has to utilize a specific skill. So if you have multiple

specific skill. So if you have multiple skills and the description is not clear, the agent will not know which skill to use. and instructions is as I mentioned

use. and instructions is as I mentioned it is step-by-step guide to get to a specific goal. The templates, examples,

specific goal. The templates, examples, notes and configuration and validation are optional. In this quick start guide,

are optional. In this quick start guide, we will skip these sections and we will just start with title, description and instructions. Okay, now let's go back to

instructions. Okay, now let's go back to our cursor and I've copied a skill and I'll paste it. So this is our title create API route and this is the description and these are the

instructions ask user for what method to use the route path and so on. Okay so

this is a skill that will be used to create APIs. Now let's test this. Press

create APIs. Now let's test this. Press

Ctrl I to open this new chat. here to

refer to a skill you can just type slash and then here your skills will be listed here API creation skill the skill that we just created is already linked okay

now you can just click on this or even if you don't include any skill will automatically pick the right skill to use according to your skill description but for this tutorial let me just use

this and let's say create an API to create users all right now I can just hit enter and here you will see see the reasoning to here as you can see it says

okay let's just see the reasoning the user wants to utilize the API creation skill and I've noticed they've already inline the skill.md content I need to follow these instructions carefully okay

so here it is asking us what we want to do according to the skill where's the skill yeah so we have the instructions to ask the user for these things right

and it is asking so let's say use method post route path is API/ users use flask and what does user field have? So see

now if I user has let's say just uh email and password but we did not have this creation skill cursor would go ahead and create a full-fledged users API with I don't know how many fields.

So this is very important to actually keep our agent in line. Okay, we can just pass things like this and it'll take these input and continue to create our API. So this is one of the skills.

our API. So this is one of the skills.

Now to create another skill, what you can do is you can just go to the skills folder again and create a new file. Not

a new file. My bad. Go inside skills.

Create a new folder. And let's call this documentation agent. Documentation skill. Okay. Inside

agent. Documentation skill. Okay. Inside

this documentation skill, we can have a new file. Call it skill.md. And in the

new file. Call it skill.md. And in the skill.md, we'll have documentation

skill.md, we'll have documentation related skill.

Again, I'll just copy a skill. Okay. And

now we have a documentation skill. So

while this is going on, what we can do is we can create a new agent.

Okay. And we can call our documentation skill and say write documentation for the user creation API and it'll go ahead

and start doing that. So while our work is still going on, we can go ahead and use a new skill to create documentations. So this is how you can

documentations. So this is how you can create multiple skills and quickly get started with skills. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments below. Also, if you want to have a more

below. Also, if you want to have a more comprehensive guide on how to use skills, how to have cursor wide skill, not just project specific skills, if you want to create skills that are

applicable in all the projects, let me know in the comments below. And happy

coding.