Comment by michaelbuckbee

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to do that for various tools in a way that's context efficient, because otherwise you're relying on either potentially outdated knowledge that Claude has built in (leading to errors b/c CC doesn't know about recent versions) or chucking the entirety of a man page into your default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