Agent skills

Agent skills are self-contained instructions that teach an AI coding agent how to use a tool. Docling ships a usage skill inside its Python package, so that once Docling is installed, agents can discover it and learn — from the docs authored by the Docling project — how to convert, extract, and chunk documents correctly.

The Docling usage skill

The skill lives inside the installed package at:

docling/.agents/skills/docling/
├── SKILL.md                     # entry point: what Docling is + when to use each path
└── references/
    ├── cli.md                   # convert any format from the command line
    ├── python-sdk.md            # DocumentConverter + PipelineOptions, batch, ASR, image/table export
    ├── extraction.md            # DocumentExtractor — pull typed fields out of a document (beta)
    ├── rag.md                   # chunking + LangChain / LlamaIndex / Haystack loaders
    ├── service-client.md        # remote conversion via docling-serve (self-hosted or managed)
    └── slim-packaging.md        # docling-slim install extras

SKILL.md is a short router; the references/*.md files are loaded on demand, so an agent reads only what the current task needs.

Installing and discovering the skill

The skill is packaged into the docling wheel and source distribution — there is nothing extra to install. Any of the following makes it available on disk:

pip install docling
# or, to run without a persistent install:
uvx --from docling docling --help

Agent runtimes that follow the emerging library-skills convention look for skills under a package's .agents/skills/ directory and expose them automatically once the package is importable. Because the exact discovery mechanism differs between tools and is still evolving, consult your agent framework's documentation for how it loads packaged skills. The SKILL.md frontmatter (name, description) is what those runtimes use to decide when the skill is relevant.

You can always point an agent at the files directly — locate them with:

python -c "import importlib.util, pathlib; \
print(pathlib.Path(importlib.util.find_spec('docling').origin).parent / '.agents/skills/docling')"

What the skill covers

The skill routes an agent to the right Docling entry point for the task:

Usage vs. development skills

The skill described here is a usage skill — it helps agents use Docling. Contributors working on Docling use separate development skills kept in the repository's own .agents/skills/ directory; those are not shipped in the package.