TL;DR: Your AI coding assistant is a generalist. It writes Flutter that looks right but quietly reaches for 2022 patterns. Agent Skills are a new, official way (from the Dart and Flutter teams) to hand your agent task-specific, battle-tested workflows it loads on demand. Two repos, flutter/skills and dart-lang/skills, ship ready-to-use skills for responsive layouts, routing, testing, localization, static analysis, and more. Install in one command:
npx skills add flutter/skills --skill '*' --agent universal
npx skills add dart-lang/skills --skill '*' --agent universal
This post breaks down what they are, how they differ from rules files and MCP, the full catalog, what a real skill looks like under the hood, and whether they actually move the needle. (Spoiler: mostly yes, with one honest caveat.)
Let me tell you about a fight I have almost every day.
