Comment by netcraft

Comment by netcraft a day ago

I use claude code every day, and havent had a chance to dig super deep into skills, but even though ive read a lot of people describe them and say they're the best thing so far, I still dont get them. Theyre things the agent chooses to call right? They have different permissions? is it a tool call with different permissions and more context? I have yet to see a single post give an actual real-world concrete example of how theyre supposed to be used or a compare and contrast with other approaches.

michaelbuckbee a day ago

The prerequisite thought here is that you're using CC to invoke CLI tools.

So now you need to get CC to understand _how_ to do that for various tools in a way that's context efficient, because otherwise you're relying on either potentially outdated knowledge that Claude has built in (leading to errors b/c CC doesn't know about recent versions) or chucking the entirety of a man page into your default context (inefficent).

What the Skill files do is then separate the when from the how.

Consider the git cli.

The skill file has a couple of sentences on when to use the git cli and then a much longer section on how it's supposed to be used, and the "how" section isn't loaded until you actually need it.

I've got skills for stuff like invoking the native screenshot CLI tool on the Mac, for calling a custom shell script that uses the github API to download and pull in screenshots from issues (b/c the cli doesn't know how to do this), for accessing separate APIs for data, etc.

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WA a day ago

After CC used that skill and it is now in the context, how do you get rid of it later when you don’t need the skill anymore and don’t want to have your context stuffed with useless skill descriptions?

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- michaelbuckbee a day ago
  
  You'd need to do the "/clear" or other context manipulations.
  
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majormajor 21 hours ago

What I find works best for complex things is having one session generate the plan and then dispatching new sessions for each step to prevent context-rot. Not "parallel agents" but "sequential agents."

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sshh12 a day ago

Maybe these might be handy: - https://github.com/anthropics/skills - https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/equipping-agents-for-t...

I think if it literally as a collection of .md files and scripts to help perform some set of actions. I'm excited for it not really as a "new thing" (as mentioned in the post) but as effectively an endorsement for this pattern of agent-data interaction.

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netcraft a day ago

apparently I missed Simon Willison's article, this at least somewhat explains them: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/claude-skills/

So if youre building your own agent, this would be a directory of markdown documents with headers that you tell the agent to scan so that its aware of them, and then if it thinks they could be useful it can choose to read all the instructions into its context? Is it any more than that?

I guess I dont understand how this isnt just RAG with an index you make the agent aware of?

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brabel a day ago

It also looks a lot like a tool that has a description mentioning it has a more detailed MD file the LLM can read for instructions on complex workflows, doesn’t it? MCP has the concept of resources for this sort of thing. I don’t see any difference between calling a tool and calling a CLI otherwise.

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nostrebored a day ago

I mean it is technically RAG as the LLM is deciding to retrieve a document. But it’s very constrained.
The skills that I use all direct a next action and how to do it. Most of them instruct to use Tasks to isolate context. Some of them provide abstraction specific context (when working with framework code, find all consumers before making changes. add integration tests for the desired state if it’s missing, then run tests to see…) and others just inject only the correct company specific approach to solving only this problem into Task context.
They are composable and you can build the logic table of when an instance is “skilled” enough. I found them worse than hooks with subagents when I started, but now I see them as the coolest thing in Claude code.
The last benefit is nobody on your team even had to know they exist. You can just have them as part of onboarding and everyone can take advantage of what you’ve learned even when working on greenfield projects that don’t have a CLAUDE.md.

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