AI Skills Have an Inheritance Problem (Here's the Fix)

There's a growing problem in AI tooling that nobody's talking about. Anthropic's Claude Code shipped Skills — markdown files that define AI behavior. Instructions, conditionals, logic flow, all written in English. A SKILL.md is literally a program in human language. This was a genuine paradigm shift. But there's a catch. The Duplication Problem Skills are getting copied everywhere. People take a SKILL.md from one repository, paste it into another, change two lines, and call it their own. Skill marketplaces are filling up with near-identical copies. There's no extension mechanism. No way to build on someone else's work without forking it. Sound familiar? This is exactly what happened before object-oriented programming solved inheritance. Developers copied entire functions, changed a few lines, maintained separate copies that diverged over time. We solved this in OOP decades ago. It's time to solve it for AI skills. The Standard: Extensible Skills I'm proposing a standard for how AI skil