Platform Engineering’s New Superpower – Capturing Specialized Knowledge with Anthropic SKILLs

Platform Engineering’s New Superpower – Capturing Specialized Knowledge with Anthropic SKILLs The Power of Anthropic SKILLs – Codifying Expertise Real World Test – The MongoDB Firefight The Process – From Troubleshooting to Reusable SKILL The Unexpected Policy Guardrail The Takeaway – The Missing Link in Platform Engineering Here’s the reality for any platform team – No single person can be an expert in all of it. This constant demand for deep, specialized knowledge across dozens of systems creates inevitable bottlenecks and forces firefighting. This specialization gap is the raison d’être for our field, and there needs to be a way to bridge it. Recently, we found a potential answer in Anthropic SKILLs , and a production MongoDB alert proved its transformative value. Anthropic recently released the concept of a SKILL. Simply put, a SKILL is a way to give an LLM reliable, specialized capabilities that go beyond its general training data. You’re essentially providing the AI with a custom, specialized tool and clear instructions on how and when to use it. It’s the mechanism to transform a general purpose LLM into a highly effective specialist. At Nirmata, we recognized this potential, and immediately integrated support for it in our Nirmata AI platform engineering assistant. Our assistant came pre-loaded with native SKILLs focused on our domain, such as Policy conversion ( OPA to Kyverno , between Kyverno versions), Kyverno policy generation and Chainsaw tests. But the real game-changer is the ability for the agent to discover and learn new SKILLs. The opportunity to test this capability came quickly.