We're trying to solve a similar problem at wispbit - this is an interesting way to do it!
Claude Skills
71–80 of 443 posts
Re: Claude Skills
#72I feel like a danger with this sort of thing is that the capability of the system to use the right skill is limited by the little blurb you give about what the skill is for. Contrast with the way a human learns skills - as we gain experience with a skill, we get better at understanding when it's the right tool for the job. But Claude is always starting from ground zero and skimming your descriptions.
IMO this is a context window issue. Humans are pretty good are memorizing super broad context without great accuracy. Sometimes our "recall" function doesn't even work right ("How do you say 'blah' in German again?"), so the more you specialize (say, 10k hours / mastery), the better you are at recalling a specific set of "skills", but perhaps not other skills. On the other hand, LLMs have a programatic context with c…
I commented here already about deli-gator ( https://github.com/ryancnelson/deli-gator ) , but your summary nailed what I didn’t mention here before: Context.
I’d been re-teaching Claude to craft Rest-api calls with curl every morning for months before i realized that skills would let me delegate that to cheaper models, re-using cached-token-queries, and save my context window for my actual problem-space CONTEXT.
Re: Claude Skills
#73getting hard to keep up with skills, plugins, marketplaces, connectors, add-ons, yada yada
Well, have some understanding: the good folks need to produce something, since their main product is not delivering the much yearned for era of joblessness yet. It's not for you, it's signalling their investors - see, we're not burning your cash paying a bunch of PhDs to tweak the model weights without visible results. We are actually building products. With a huge and willing A/B testing base.
Re: Claude Skills
#74getting hard to keep up with skills, plugins, marketplaces, connectors, add-ons, yada yada
IMHO, don't, don't keep up. Just like "best practices in prompt engineering", these are just temporary workaround for current limitations, and they're bound to disappear quickly. Unless you really need the extra performance right now, just wait until models get you this performance out of the box instead of investing into learning something that'll be obsolete in months.
Re: Claude Skills
#75[deleted]
Re: Claude Skills
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cheaper, not free. Also, no training to learn a new skill. Building a new one that works well is a project, but then it will scale up as much as you like. This is bringing some of the advantages of software development to office tasks, but you give up some things like reliable, deterministic results.
There is an acquisition cost of researching and developing the LLM, but the running cost should not be classified as a wage, hence cost of labor is zero.
It’s still opex for finance
Re: Claude Skills
#77It is a bit ironic that the better the models get they seem to need more and more user input.
More like they can better react to user input within their context window. With older models, the value of that additional user input would have been much more limited.
Re: Claude Skills
#78Anything the model chooses to use is going to waste context and get utilized poorly. Also, the more skills you have, the worse they're going to be. It's subagents v2.
Just use slash commands, they work a lot better.
Re: Claude Skills
#79Subagents, plugins, skills, hooks, mcp servers, output styles, memory, extended thinking... seems like a bunch of stuff you can configure in Claude Code that overlap in a lot of areas. Wish they could figure out a way to simplify things.
Also the post does not contain a single word how it relates to the very similar agents in claude code. Capabilities, connectors, tasks, apps, custom-gpts, ... the space needs some serious consolidation and standardization! I noticed the general tendency for overlap also when trying to update claude since 3+ methods conflicted with each other (brew, curl, npm, bun, vscode). Might this be the handwriting of AI? ;)
The post is simply "here's a folder with crap in it I may or may not use".
Re: Claude Skills
#80All of these random features is just pushing me further towards model agnostic tools like goose
Thanks for sharing goose.
This phase of LLM product development feels a bit like the Tower of Babel days with Cloud services before wrapper tools became popular and more standardization happened.