{"id":197,"date":"2026-08-25T02:14:48","date_gmt":"2026-08-25T02:14:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sedso.io\/blog\/?p=197"},"modified":"2026-08-25T02:14:48","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T02:14:48","slug":"what-language-are-agent-skills-written-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sedso.io\/blog\/2026\/08\/25\/what-language-are-agent-skills-written-in\/","title":{"rendered":"What language are agent skills written in?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A href=\u201chttps:\/\/plicara.ai\/research\/agent-skill-languages\/\u201d>Plicara Research<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p> In the first quarter of 2026, 13.0% of newly written agent skills were in a language other than English, and one quarter later it was 16.3%. That is three points in three months across 255,068 skills, with confidence intervals nowhere near touching. For comparison, GitHub-wide non-English documentation took ten years to travel from 3.7% to 13.0%, so whatever is happening here is happening at a different speed entirely, and the most plausible explanation is that AI development has arrived somewhere other than San Francisco.<\/p>\n<p>Reviewing the data, it turns out that the claim is stronger than the obvious version of it, because English is not a proxy for American. GitHub&#8217;s fastest-growing developer population by a wide margin is India, which writes in English, as do Nigeria and Singapore, so a language count cannot see any of them. The non-English share is therefore not a measure of how much of this ecosystem sits outside the United States. It is a floor beneath it, and everything below should be read that way.<\/p>\n<p>For context, a skill is a SKILL.md file in a folder, holding instructions for an AI agent in plain prose, loaded when the agent judges the task relevant. Anthropic published the specification in October 2025, and it spreads the way a recipe spreads: somebody copies it. Nine months later there were 3.8 million of them across 282,200 public repositories, which is what the GitSkills dataset collects. Skills are strange as software, by which we mean the traditional kind, because this is one of the things AI has upended. They are written in human language and the runtime is a multilingual model, so there is no technical reason to write one in English: a developer in Shenzhen or S\u00e3o Paulo can state a procedure more precisely in their own language, and the agent will follow it. Whether it follows it as well is a better question, and much harder to answer than anything a file crawl can settle. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Plicara Research: In the first quarter of 2026, 13.0% of newly written agent skills were in a language other than English, and one quarter later it was 16.3%. That is three points in three months across 255,068 skills, with confidence intervals nowhere&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedso.io\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedso.io\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedso.io\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedso.io\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedso.io\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sedso.io\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":198,"href":"https:\/\/sedso.io\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions\/198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedso.io\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedso.io\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedso.io\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}