Agents, skills and tools: what the difference actually means

Most content tooling collapses three different things into one: a prompt. Magnity keeps them apart, and the separation is what makes the platform governable.

Agents own responsibilities

An agent is defined by what it is accountable for, not by the text you type at it. The Email Agent is responsible for email campaigns. The Rule Agent is responsible for whether material meets your standard. Because responsibility is explicit, an agent can be reviewed, licensed and improved as a unit.

Skills are reusable capabilities

Drafting, adapting tone, localising, applying persona and industry context, checking rules, summarising, analysing gaps, optimising for search — these are skills. They live inside agents and are shared between them, which is why localisation and audience context are not products you buy separately: every agent has them.

Tools execute

Tools do concrete things against real systems: read a URL or a PDF, query analytics or search data, prepare content for a CMS or a marketing automation platform, read and write personas. A tool is the point where the platform touches your stack, which is also where your access controls apply.

Why it matters

A prompt library gives you text you have to police. An architecture of agents, skills and tools gives you a system where the rules are applied by design and every action has an owner.