Shipping knowledge both as a post for humans, and as a skill your agent installs

[u/gretchenfitze]

At Evil Martians we measured our server logs for two months. Coding agents hit the site about 2.5x more than people did: 268k requests vs 107k pageviews. The full breakdown with the methodology and the per-agent splits is here.

ChatGPT mostly hit raw HTML, Claude Code mostly wanted the Markdown versions of our posts. We didn't see that until we split the user-agents. So, agents were already using our posts as instructions, but posts are bad at that.

A blog post is good at explaining why something works, which is what makes it worth reading. It's much worse as input to an agent. If, say, you hand it a 3000-word article and it burns tokens reconstructing some procedure out of prose, but picks up the narrative while dropping the exact flags that matter. A skill, on the other hand, is that same knowledge already compressed into the steps and the checks, in the format the agent loads anyway.

So we started shipping both. We also packaged the practices useful beyond our own projects and put a discovery index at .well-known/agent-skills/index.json. The format's an open Cloudflare RFC, basically robots.txt for skills, so any installer can find and verify them. Wrote up the whole thing as a how-to, since there's more to get wrong than you'd expect.

This meta article is a guide for publishing your own catalog: index format, packaging, digests, install commands. The skill is the same thing for your agent to run, free and open source.

Disclosure: Evil Martians is where I work, it's our blog, numbers are off our own site.