agentskills-langchain

---

title: agentskills-langchain description: Maintenance-only native LangChain integration and migration to framework-owned MCP clients.

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

Generates a set of LangChain StructuredTool instances from a SkillRegistry, ready to be passed to any LangChain agent.

[!WARNING] Deprecated and maintenance-only starting in v0.6.0. 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 documented feature gaps.

Installation

pip install agentskills-langchain

Requires Python 3.12 or newer. Installs agentskills-core and langchain-core as dependencies.

Usage

from pathlib import Path

from agentskills_core import SkillRegistry
from agentskills_fs import LocalFileSystemSkillProvider
from agentskills_langchain 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()
system_prompt = f"{catalog}\n\n{instructions}"

Pass tools to your LangChain agent and inject system_prompt into the system message. The catalog tells the agent what skills exist; the usage instructions tell it how to use the tools.

Generated Tools

All tools are async-compatible (StructuredTool with coroutine).

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.

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)

if fast_path is not None:
    system_prompt = fast_path.prompt          # the body, inlined
    tools = get_tools(registry, fast_path=fast_path)   # resource tools only
else:
    catalog = await registry.get_skills_catalog()
    system_prompt = f"{catalog}\n\n{get_tools_usage_instructions()}"
    tools = get_tools(registry)

resolve_fast_path returns None unless the effective skill set is exactly one and its body fits under a token ceiling, and get_tools(registry, fast_path=None) is the normal eight-tool list — so nothing changes unless it fires. 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 the resource tools stay are documented in the core README.

API

get_tools(registry: SkillRegistry, *, max_inline_binary_bytes: int = 65536, fast_path: FastPath | None = None) -> list[StructuredTool]

Returns a list of LangChain structured tools bound to the given registry. With a fast_path, the four body-access tools are omitted because the body is already in the prompt.

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.

Example

See examples/langchain/ for a full working demo.

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 LangChain image content blocks instead:

tools = get_tools(registry, vision=True)

[{"type": "image", "source_type": "base64", "mime_type": "image/png", "data": "iVBORw0..."}]

It is off by default because handing an image block 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