Comment by idopmstuff

Comment by idopmstuff 11 hours ago

I have been using Claude Code to automate a bunch of my business tasks, and I set up slash commands for each of them. Each slash command starts by reading from a .md file of instructions. I asked Claude how this is different from skills and the only substantive thing it could come up with was that Claude wouldn't be able to use these on its own, without me invoking the slash command (which is fine; I wouldn't want it to go off and start checking my inventory of its own volition).

So yeah, I agree that it's all just documentation. I know there's been some evidence shown that skills work better, but my feeling is that in the long run it'll fall to the wayside, like prompt engineering, for a couple of reasons. First, many skills will just become unnecessary - models will be able to make slide decks or do frontend design without specific skills (Gemini's already excellent at design without anything beyond the base model, imho). Second, increased context windows and overall intelligence will obviate the need for the specific skills paradigm. You can just throw all the stuff you want Claude to know in your claude.md and call it a day.

steveklabnik 10 hours ago

Claude Code recently deprecated slash commands in favor of skills because they were so similar. Or another way of looking at it is, they added the ability to invoke a skill via /skill-name.

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idopmstuff 10 hours ago

Yeah, I saw that announcement but still can't figure out what the actual impact is - doesn't change anything for me (my non-skill slash commands still work).

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- steveklabnik 8 hours ago
  
  The actual impact is that there should be less confusion in the future about "what's the difference between these two" because there isn't really.
  To overly programmer-brain it, a slash command is just a skill with a null frontmatter. This means that it doesn't participate in progressive disclosure, aka Claude won't consider invoking it automatically.
  
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mordymoop 8 hours ago

Workflow-wise, the important distinction for me has been that I can refine a Skill by telling Claude Code to use it for related tasks until it does exactly what I want, correctly, the first time. Having a solid, iteratively perfected Skill really cuts down on subsequent iteration.

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kurthr 11 hours ago

So how is this slash command limit enforced? Is it part of the Claude API/PostTraining etc? It seems like a useful tool if it is!

I'd like a user writeable, LLM readable, LLM non-writable character/sequence. That would make it a lot easier to know at a glance that a command/file/directory/username/password wasn't going to end up in context and being used by a rogue agent.

It wouldn't be fool proof, since it could probably find some other tool out there to generate it (eg write-me some unicode python), but it's something I haven't heard of that sounds useful. If it could be made fool/tool proof (fools and tools are so resourceful) that would be even better.

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idopmstuff 11 hours ago

It's part of the Claude Code harness. I honestly haven't thought at all about security related to it; it's just a nice convenience to trigger a commonly run process.

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vidarh 9 hours ago

A bit of caution: it's perfectly able to look up and read the slash-command, so while it may be true it technically can't "invoke" a slash-command via TaskTool, it most certainly can execute all of the steps in it if the slash-command is somewhere you grant it read access, and will tend to try to do so if you tell it to invoke a slash command.

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