I feel like these posts are interesting, but become irrelevant quickly. Does anyone actually follow these as guides, or just consume them as feedback for how we wish we could interface with LLMs and the workarounds we currently use?
Right now these are reading like a guide to prolog in the 1980s.
I wouldn't say I follow them as guides, but I think the field is changing quickly enough that it's good, or at least interesting, to read what's working well for other people.
It's a balance and we use both.
Skills doesn't totally deprecate documenting things in CLAUDE.md but agree that a lot of these can be defined as skills instead.
Skill frontmatter also still sits in the global context so it's not really a token optimization either.
The skill lets you compress the amount loaded to just the briefest description, with the “where do I go to get more info” being implicit. You should use a SKILL.md for evry added tool. At which point, putting instructions in CLAIDE.md becomes redundant and confusing to the LLM.
Given that this space is so rapidly evolving, these kinds of posts are helpful just to make sure you aren't missing anything big. I've caught myself doing something the hard way after reading one of these. In this case, the framing is basically man pages for CLIs was a helpful description of sills that gives me some ideas about how to improve interaction with an in-house CLI my co. uses.