Prompt vs Tool vs Skill for AI Agent Product Specs

Understanding prompt vs tool vs skill is critical when writing AI agent product specs. Mixing these up means building the wrong features and wasting engineering time. Think of an AI agent like a carpenter. The prompt is your spoken instruction, the tool is the heavy machinery, and the skill is the trained technique. In AI, a prompt is the text request, while a tool is an external action like a Stripe API. Unlike human muscle memory, an AI skill is a saved bundle of prompts and rules. A support bot uses a refund policy checklist as its skill before calling a payment tool. This helps you audit specs and stop asking for new tools when you just need a better skill. In this lesson: - Defining prompt vs tool vs skill for AI agents - Visualizing agent architecture with a woodshop analogy - Auditing specs to separate rules from external actions - Applying the user goal and saved rules checklist U2xAI Academy - AI skills for product managers.