It superficially reminds me of the old "Alexa Skills" thing (I'm not even sure if Alexa still has "Skills"). It might just be the name making that connection for me.
Seems to be a bit more than that.
Claude Skills
21–30 of 443 posts
Re: Claude Skills
#22It superficially reminds me of the old "Alexa Skills" thing (I'm not even sure if Alexa still has "Skills"). It might just be the name making that connection for me.
Alexa skills are 3rd party add-ons/plugins. Want to control your hue lights? add the phillips hue skill. I think claude skills in an alexa world would be like having to seed alexa with a bunch of context for it to remember how to turn my lights on and off or it will randomly attempt a bunch of incorrect ways of doing it until it gets lucky.
Re: Claude Skills
#23Re: Claude Skills
#24Interesting. For Claude Code, this seems to have generous overlap with existing practice of having markdown "guides" listed for access in the CLAUDE.md. Maybe skills can simply make managing such guides more organized and declarative.
If so, it would be a better way than encapsulating functionality in markdown.
I have been using claude code to create some and organize them but they can have diminishing return.
Re: Claude Skills
#25I'm perplexed why they would use such a silly example in their demo video (rotating an image of a dog upside down and cropping). Surely they can find more compelling examples of where these skills could be used?
Re: Claude Skills
#26Can someone explain the differences between this and Agents in Claude Code? Logically they seem similar. From my perspective it seems like Skills are more well-defined in their behavior and function?
Skills might be used by Agents.
Skills can merge together like lego.
Agents might be more separated.
Re: Claude Skills
#27Seems like a more organized way to do the equivalent of a folder full of md files + instructing the LLM to ls that folder and read the ones it needs
If so it would be most welcome since LLMs doesn't always consistently follow the folder full of MD files to the same depth and consistency.
Re: Claude Skills
#28getting hard to keep up with skills, plugins, marketplaces, connectors, add-ons, yada yada
Thats the start of the singularity. The changes will keep accelerating and less and less people will be able to keep up until only the AIs themselves know how to use.
Re: Claude Skills
#29It superficially reminds me of the old "Alexa Skills" thing (I'm not even sure if Alexa still has "Skills"). It might just be the name making that connection for me.
And how many of those Alexa Skills are still being updated...
This is where waiting for this stuff to stablize/standardize, and then writing a "skill" based on an actual RFC or standard protocol makes more sense, IMO. I've been burned too many times building vendor-locked chatbot extensions.
Re: Claude Skills
#30"Skills are repeatable and customizable instructions that Claude can follow in any chat."
We used to call that a programming language. Here, they are presumably repeatable instructions how to generate stolen code or stolen procedures so users have to think even less or not at all.