Agent Skills: Next Phase of Books

The question that keeps tugging at me is: what comes after books as a way to transfer knowledge?

After the era of books, we have not discovered many truly new options for consuming and digesting ideas more easily, or for packaging them in a more compact, high‑leverage way. Sometimes that role is played by a blog post. Sometimes it is a YouTube channel. But those are mostly shifts in medium, not in compression. The underlying unit of knowledge has not really changed.

So the question lingers in the background for me:

What is the next form of the book going to look like?

Lately I’ve been thinking about agent skills in AI agents as a new form of books.

Not books in the full human sense, of course. Fiction, essays, philosophy, and memoir still do something irreplaceable for us. They give joy, shape taste, expand emotional range, and sometimes change how we see the world. A skill cannot really do that.

But when I think about practical, professional books, the analogy starts to feel surprisingly strong.

When I read Inspired as a product manager, the value is not just the words on the page. The value is that years of experience, judgment, and best practices have been compressed into a form that someone else can absorb and apply. You read it, interpret it, and try to bring pieces of it into your own work. The same is true for books on marketing, design, leadership, writing, negotiation, or strategy. They are containers for accumulated experience.

That makes me wonder whether, in the agent era, skills might play a similar role.

Books for Humans, Skills for Agents

A skill is also a way of packaging knowledge. It takes a set of ideas, workflows, heuristics, and constraints and turns them into something reusable. The difference is that a book is written for human understanding, while a skill is written for agent execution.

A book says, "here is how to think about this."
A skill says, "here is how to approach this task."

That is why the comparison feels useful to me. Both books and skills are ways of compressing experience. Both are trying to transfer knowledge from one context to another. But they are optimized for different readers. One is meant to be internalized by a person. The other is meant to be operationalized by a system.

In that sense, a skill feels like a book rewritten for action.

Why This Matters

This matters because most people do not want to master every domain themselves.

If I want to use a marketing agent, I do not necessarily want to become an expert marketer first. I want that agent to inherit some of the craft that experienced marketers already know. That includes things like how to structure a landing page, how to write a headline, how to position a product, how to think about audience, how to maintain brand consistency, and how to avoid obvious mistakes.

Today, that knowledge lives across books, articles, courses, blog posts, and years of practice. In the future, more of it may live in skills.

That changes the role of expertise. Traditionally, knowledge became economically valuable when humans learned it and applied it. You bought a book, took a course, hired a consultant, or learned by doing. But if skills become transferable knowledge for agents, then expertise can be packaged in a much more operational form.

Instead of only selling information, people might sell executable know-how.

From Learning to Equipping

This is the shift I keep coming back to.

In the past, if you wanted better work, you usually had to learn more yourself. You read the book, studied the framework, practiced the craft, and slowly improved. That still matters, and probably always will. But with agents, there is a new option: instead of learning everything yourself, you can equip a system with the right judgment and workflow.

Instead of buying a book on branding, someone might buy a branding skill.
Instead of reading five essays on growth, they might buy a growth agent already equipped with a bundle of proven skills.

The product is no longer just "learn this." It becomes "use this."

That is a very different economic object.

The Possibility of a Skill Marketplace

If skills are transferable, then it feels natural that a marketplace will emerge around them.

We already have marketplaces for books, software, and labor. But skills sit in an interesting place between all three. They are not just content, because they are meant to be used. They are not exactly software either, because what they contain is often judgment, heuristics, and domain taste rather than deterministic logic. And they are not labor in the traditional sense, because once created, they can be reused at scale.

That means experts may eventually package their knowledge in a different way.

• A marketer might not just write a book or course. They might build a campaign strategy skill.
• A designer might not just publish advice. They might package visual hierarchy and brand consistency into a reusable skill.
• A product leader might encode discovery practices, prioritization logic, and stakeholder communication into a system an agent can apply.

In that world, people may not only buy books or courses. They may buy skills, bundles of skills, or full agents equipped with those skills from the start.

Agents May Need Their Own Media

Once I started thinking about skills this way, another idea followed naturally.

What if agents also need their own version of books and newsletters?

Humans read books and newsletters to stay current, to get inspired, and to absorb new ways of thinking. Agents may eventually need something similar, but in a different format. Not necessarily long prose meant to be enjoyed, but structured information meant to be evaluated and acted on.

An agent could read a new marketing tactic, decide it is relevant, test it in a safe context, measure the result, and then suggest turning it into a reusable skill. In that world, books and newsletters do not disappear. They become upstream sources in a larger learning pipeline.

The flow might look like this:

• Raw ideas are published
• Agents ingest them
• Useful patterns get tested
• Validated patterns get converted into reusable skills.

That is a very different knowledge system from the one we are used to.

What Skills Still Cannot Do

At the same time, I do not think skills replace books.

That analogy breaks down the moment we move beyond practical knowledge.

A skill can compress action, but books often expand thought. A skill is designed to produce a result. A book can leave you with ambiguity, discomfort, wonder, or a completely different worldview. Some of the most important things we get from reading have nothing to do with execution at all. They have to do with becoming a different kind of person.

That is especially true for fiction, philosophy, memoir, and even great essays. Those forms are not only about transferring know-how. They shape taste, emotional range, moral imagination, and perspective. Skills are not good substitutes for that.

Even within professional books, something gets lost when knowledge is compressed too aggressively. A great book often preserves context: why an idea emerged, where it fails, what assumptions it depends on, and what tensions remain unresolved. A skill may preserve the best practice while losing the depth around it. That makes it useful, but also brittle.

So I do not think skills are "the new books" in a total sense. They are closer to the new manuals, playbooks, and handbooks for agents.

A Different Future for Expertise

What excites me is not that agents will stop needing human knowledge. It is the opposite.

If anything, human knowledge may become even more valuable, because now it can be translated into a form that agents can execute. The challenge shifts from simply having expertise to packaging it well. The next important layer may not just be better models, but better skills. Better translation of judgment into action.

That has economic implications, of course. But it also has cultural implications. It changes what it means to publish knowledge. It changes what people may choose to buy. And it changes how expertise flows through the world.

For a long time, books were one of the main ways we turned experience into something transferable. In the agent era, skills may become another.

Not a replacement for books, but a new format for a different kind of reader.

Closing Thought

Maybe that is the simplest way to say it.

Books taught humans how to think, reflect, and sometimes how to work.
Skills may increasingly teach agents how to act.

And if that becomes true, then part of the future of knowledge may not just be about writing ideas down. It may be about encoding them into something that can actually be deployed.

In the past, if you wanted better work, you read more.

In the future, you may also equip better.