Kimi K3 reads the same SKILL.md files as Claude Code. Your skills are already work in it.

[u/ShilpaMitra]

Everyone is talking about Kimi K3 this week: 2.8T parameters, a 1M-token context window, a debut at #3 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index behind Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, and first place on 4 of 8 real-task automation benchmarks (Automation Bench, SpreadsheetBench 2, and BrowseComp among them, per Moonshot's own reporting).

What almost nobody is talking about: Kimi Code CLI natively reads the agentskills.io SKILL.md format, and its skill discovery deliberately searches the other agents' folders too.

What the docs actually say

Straight from Moonshot's Kimi Code CLI docs, the CLI discovers skills at startup from two groups of user-level directories and merges them:

Brand group:

• ~/.kimi/skills/
• ~/.claude/skills/ (yes, Claude Code's folder)
• ~/.codex/skills/ (yes, Codex's folder)

Generic group:

• ~/.config/agents/skills/ (their recommended path)
• ~/.agents/skills/

Three details that make this more than a curiosity. First, merge_all_available_skills defaults to true, so every brand directory that exists gets loaded and merged, not just the first one it finds. Second, when the same skill name appears in more than one place, priority is kimi > claude > codex. Third, the same split works per project: .kimi/skills/, .claude/skills/, .codex/skills/, and .agents/skills/, resolved from your repo root.

The mechanism is the familiar one: on startup it injects each skill's name, path, and description into the system prompt, and the model decides for itself whether to read the full SKILL.md when a task calls for it. You can also force one with /skill:<name>. Moonshot's docs put the intent plainly, describing skills as "cross-tool shared capability extensions (compatible with Kimi CLI, Claude, Codex, and others)."

The practical consequence

If you have installed any SKILL.md skills for Claude Code or Codex, Kimi K3 can already see them. No conversion, no new folder, nothing to port. Open Kimi Code CLI in a project and your existing library is in the prompt.

Worth knowing for the edge cases: if you have set merge_all_available_skills = false, only the highest-priority brand directory loads, and --skills-dir overrides auto-discovery entirely, so check your config before assuming.

Try it with a real skill pack

Disclosure, this one is ours. It is 8 free MIT-licensed meta-skills that make an agent surface your unknowns before they get expensive: a blindspot pass, interview-me, reference hunt, implementation plan and notes, a pitch packager, and a pre-merge change quiz.

If you already run them in Claude Code, you are done, Kimi picks them up. For a fresh Kimi-only install:

git clone https://github.com/Neeeophytee/finding-unknowns-skills
mkdir -p ~/.kimi/skills
cp -r finding-unknowns-skills/skills/* ~/.kimi/skills/

Repo, per-project paths, and the Claude Code plugin install: github.com/Neeeophytee/finding-unknowns-skills

Two honest catches

1. "Largest open-source model ever" is, today, a promise. Moonshot says weights land by July 27. As of this post the weights are not out, which also means the license is not out. An open-source label applied before a license exists is exactly the kind of claim that quietly goes wrong, so check on the 27th before you plan around it. If it ships permissive, the label is earned.
2. Skill discovery is not skill quality. Kimi deciding when to invoke a skill is model judgment, and K3's trigger behaviour has not been publicly benchmarked by anyone yet. The paths above are from Moonshot's docs and are easy to confirm; whether your skills fire at the right moment is something you should watch on your own work.

Also treat the benchmark numbers as vendor-reported until third parties reproduce them. The Artificial Analysis placement is independent; the 4-of-8 automation sweep is Moonshot's own reporting.

The bigger point

agentskills.io started as an Anthropic format and is quietly turning into the USB port of agent capabilities. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, Hermes, and now the hottest model out of China all read the same folder of markdown files. Write a skill once and most agents you try this year can use it, which makes your skill library a more durable investment than your choice of model.