agentskills-agentframework

---

title: agentskills-agentframework description: Maintenance-only native Agent Framework integration and migration to framework-owned MCP clients.

Microsoft Agent Framework integration for the Agent Skills SDK - turn a skill registry into Agent Framework tools.

Generates a set of Microsoft Agent Framework FunctionTool instances from a SkillRegistry, ready to be passed to any Agent Framework agent.

[!WARNING] Deprecated and maintenance-only starting in v0.6.0, including AgentSkillsContextProvider. Existing APIs remain available and receive critical correctness and security fixes. Removal is no earlier than v0.7 after a full minor-release migration window and explicit migration gates. Published 0.5.0 wheels are unchanged. Use framework-owned MCP clients for new integrations and review the session-state and prompt-management gaps.

Installation

pip install agentskills-agentframework

Requires Python 3.12 or newer. Installs agentskills-core and agent-framework-core (>=1.0,<2.0) as dependencies.

Usage

Existing Context Provider

The simplest way to integrate is via AgentSkillsContextProvider. It plugs into the Agent Framework lifecycle and automatically injects the skill catalog and tools on every agent.run() call — no manual system-prompt assembly required.

from pathlib import Path

from agent_framework import Agent
from agentskills_core import SkillRegistry
from agentskills_fs import LocalFileSystemSkillProvider
from agentskills_agentframework import AgentSkillsContextProvider

# Set up registry
provider = LocalFileSystemSkillProvider(Path("./skills"))
registry = SkillRegistry()
await registry.register("incident-response", provider)

# Create context provider
skills_context_provider = AgentSkillsContextProvider(registry)

# Pass it to the agent — catalog + tools are injected automatically
agent = Agent(
    client=client,  # any Agent Framework chat client
    name="SREAssistant",
    instructions="You are an SRE assistant.",
    context_providers=[skills_context_provider],
)
response = await agent.run("What severity is a full DB outage?")

See examples/agent-framework/ for full working demos including client setup.

Session-aware disclosure

The provider keeps per-session bookkeeping in the state dict Agent Framework hands to before_run() / after_run(), which makes later turns cheaper than the first.

Caching stores the assembled prompt so an unchanged turn costs no registry I/O. It does not save tokens — the same text is still sent. The cache key covers the catalog format, the registered skills and the loaded set, so registering a skill mid-session is picked up without a TTL to tune.

Pruning is what makes turn N+1 smaller. When after_run() sees a get_skill_body call, the skill is recorded as loaded; its full instructions are now in the conversation, so repeating its catalog entry pays for the same thing twice. Later turns advertise the remaining skills and replace the pruned entries with a one-line reminder, and the catalog reports the narrowing (shown="2" total="3") rather than presenting itself as complete.

Deliberate limits:

• Only get_skill_body counts as a load. get_skill_outline and get_skill_section read a fragment, and a fragment is not the skill.
• If every registered skill has been loaded, the full catalog is emitted. A catalog saying the agent has no skills is worse than a repeated entry.
• If the reminder would cost more than the entries it replaces — possible when skills carry very terse metadata — pruning is declined for that turn.
• Pruning assumes the loaded body is still in the conversation. If your host compacts history, set prune_loaded_skills=False.

The loaded set is published on context.metadata["agentskills_loaded_skills"] for other context providers, and held as a plain sorted list so session state stays JSON-serialisable.

Repeated before_run() calls on the same context inject once; the guard is keyed by source_id, so two providers over two registries can still both contribute.

Single-skill fast path

An agent with one skill pays the whole discovery apparatus — a catalog listing one entry, eight tool definitions, usage instructions describing a selection workflow, and a model round trip while it calls get_skill_body — to reach content there was never a choice about.

from agentskills_core import resolve_fast_path

fast_path = await resolve_fast_path(registry)
provider = AgentSkillsContextProvider(registry, fast_path=fast_path)

resolve_fast_path returns None unless the effective skill set is exactly one and its body fits under a token ceiling, and fast_path=None is the normal path — so the call above is safe unconditionally. When it does fire, the body is injected directly, the catalog and usage instructions are gone, and only the four resource tools are attached. Pass include=selection.skill_ids to resolve against a set narrowed by agentskills-retrieval rather than the whole registry.

The ceiling, the arithmetic behind its default, and why resource tools stay are documented in the core README. Resolve it again if the registry changes.

Manual Tools

For full control over system-prompt construction, use get_tools() directly:

from pathlib import Path

from agent_framework import Agent
from agentskills_core import SkillRegistry
from agentskills_fs import LocalFileSystemSkillProvider
from agentskills_agentframework import get_tools, get_tools_usage_instructions

# Set up registry
provider = LocalFileSystemSkillProvider(Path("./skills"))
registry = SkillRegistry()
await registry.register("incident-response", provider)

# Build tools + system prompt
tools = get_tools(registry)
catalog = await registry.get_skills_catalog(format="xml")
instructions = get_tools_usage_instructions()

# Pass to agent
agent = Agent(
    client=client,  # any Agent Framework chat client
    name="SREAssistant",
    instructions=f"{catalog}\n\n{instructions}",
    tools=tools,
)

The catalog tells the agent what skills exist; the usage instructions tell it how to use the tools.

See examples/agent-framework/ for full working demos including client setup.

Generated Tools

All tools are async-compatible (FunctionTool with @tool decorator).

get_skill_outline exists so a large skill is not all-or-nothing. Its rendered text carries the whole-body cost alongside the per-section costs and says outright when get_skill_body is the cheaper call — a section fetch is not free, it costs a tool call and a model turn on top of the outline. Section keys are flat slugs and sections do not nest, so fetching a parent does not include what is indented under it in the outline.

list_skill_resources returns a JSON object keyed by resource kind. Not every backend can enumerate resources — a plain static HTTP host cannot. Rather than surfacing an exception, the tool returns {"supported": false, "note": "..."} in that case: "this cannot be listed" is something the model can act on by falling back to the names in the skill body, not an error worth retrying.

API

AgentSkillsContextProvider(registry, *, skills_instruction_prompt=None, skills_catalog_format="xml", source_id=None, cache_prompt=True, prune_loaded_skills=True)

A ContextProvider that injects skill catalog + tools into the agent session automatically via before_run(). Skips injection when the registry has no skills.

get_tools(registry: SkillRegistry, *, max_inline_binary_bytes: int = 65536) -> list[FunctionTool]

Returns a list of Agent Framework function tools bound to the given registry.

get_tools_usage_instructions() -> str

Returns a markdown string explaining the progressive-disclosure workflow - read metadata, then body, then fetch resources on demand. Designed for system-prompt injection alongside the skill catalog.

Comparison with Agent Framework's built-in provider

Agent Framework ships its own FileAgentSkillsProvider. Both plug into the same lifecycle, but they solve different problems:

If all you need is skills in a local folder, the built-in provider is already installed and is the simpler choice. Reach for this package when skills come from somewhere other than disk, when you need several sources in one catalog, or when you want the agent to distinguish a script from a reference document.

Example

See examples/agent-framework/ for full working demos.

Error Handling

All exceptions inherit from AgentSkillsError (from agentskills-core).

Binary Resources

Skill resources may be arbitrary files. Valid UTF-8 is returned as-is; anything else is returned as a JSON envelope, so a binary payload is never silently mangled into replacement characters:

{
  "name": "architecture.png",
  "media_type": "image/png",
  "size_bytes": 20481,
  "encoding": "base64",
  "content": "iVBORw0KGgo..."
}

Base64 costs roughly 1.37 characters per byte, so binaries above 64 KiB are described rather than inlined - "encoding": "none" plus a note explaining the omission. Adjust the ceiling with:

tools = get_tools(registry, max_inline_binary_bytes=256 * 1024)

Images

A base64 envelope is the right answer for an opaque binary and the wrong one for a diagram: the model gets a wall of characters where a picture was. Pass vision=True and bundled images come back as native Content(type="data") carrying a data URI instead:

tools = get_tools(registry, vision=True)

It is off by default because handing an image to a text-only model is an API error from the provider, not a degraded answer, and there is no reliable way to ask a model whether it can see. You know which model your tools are bound to; the library does not.

PNG, JPEG, GIF and WebP qualify, and only when the leading bytes say so - a name is a claim, bytes are evidence. PDF is excluded because support varies by model, and SVG because it is already text the model can read. Everything else keeps the JSON envelope exactly as above, including images past max_inline_image_bytes (5 MiB by default, against 64 KiB for opaque binaries - base64 in a text field is billed per byte, while a native image is billed by tile count).

See ADR 0009.

License

MIT