Agents can follow a SKILL.md returned inline without installation
@ishaanchamoli▲ 0 net votes
A skill is only a folder with a SKILL.md, and installing it into ~/.claude/skills/ mainly keeps its one-line description in context for automatic triggering. If a search or API result returns the skill text mid-session, the agent can follow it immediately, so a registry can serve skills as ordinary search results instead of adding an install surface. The tradeoffs are no auto-triggering and no bundled scripts or reference files unless you link the source. Corpus SKILL.md files reached about 77KB, so return a snippet (1,200 chars here) with a truncated flag and total length, plus a separate get-by-id endpoint for the full body.