Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP • Hacker News Board

Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

#131

Post by ip26 » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 9:16 PM UTC

darth_avocado wrote: post #95

AJRF wrote: post #82

This is a fairly negative comment, but putting it out there to see if other people are feeling the same thing If you told the median user of these services to set one of these up I think they would (correctly) look at you like you had two heads. People want to log in to an account, tell the thing to do something, and the system figures out the rest. MCP, Apps, Skills, Gems - all this stuff seems to be tackling the wr…

> MCP, Apps, Skills, Gems - all this stuff seems to be tackling the wrong problem My fairly negative take on all of this has been that we’re writing more docs, creating more apis and generally doing a lot of work to make the AI work, that would’ve yielded the same results if we did it for people in the first place. Half my life has been spent trying to debug issues in complex systems that do not have those available.

If writing a good document and a strong API had to happen anyway, and now you can write just that and the rest will take care of itself, we may actually have progressed. Plus the documents would then have to be there, instead of skipped like today.

The counter-argument is that code is the only way to concisely and unambiguously express how everything should work.

Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

#132

Post by threecheese » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 9:17 PM UTC

throwaway127482 wrote: post #119

XenophileJKO wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, but the reason the economics have inverted is that we can pay these new "people" <$20 for the human equivalent of ~300 hours worth of non-stop typing.

Correct. And we know the AI will read the docs whereas people usually ignore 99% of docs so it just feels like a bad use of time sometimes, unfortunately.

-ish; while you can be fairly certain it reads the docs, whether they’ve been used/synthesized is just about unknowable. The output usually looks great, but it’s up to us to ensure its accuracy; we can make it better in aggregate by tweaking dials and switches. To mitigate this we’re asking AIs to create plans and todo lists first, which adds some rigor but again we can’t know if the lists were comprehensive or even correct. It does seem to make the output better. And if the human doesnt read the docs, they can be beaten!

Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

#133

Post by ip26 » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 9:19 PM UTC

AJRF wrote: post #82

This is a fairly negative comment, but putting it out there to see if other people are feeling the same thing If you told the median user of these services to set one of these up I think they would (correctly) look at you like you had two heads. People want to log in to an account, tell the thing to do something, and the system figures out the rest. MCP, Apps, Skills, Gems - all this stuff seems to be tackling the wr…

Hypothetically, AI coding could completely absorb all that surface level iteration & posturing.

If agentic coding of good quality becomes too cheap to meter, all that is left are the deep problems.

Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

#134

Post by kvirani » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 9:19 PM UTC

zkmon wrote: post #93

AJRF wrote: post #82

This is a fairly negative comment, but putting it out there to see if other people are feeling the same thing If you told the median user of these services to set one of these up I think they would (correctly) look at you like you had two heads. People want to log in to an account, tell the thing to do something, and the system figures out the rest. MCP, Apps, Skills, Gems - all this stuff seems to be tackling the wr…

>> but deep problems aren't being solved There is no problem to solve. These days, solutions come in a package which includes the problems they intend to solve. You open the package. Now you have a problem that jumped out of the package and starts staring at you. The solution comes out of the package and chases the problem around the room. You are now technologically a more progressed human.

Wow. I hadn't thought of it like that but it resonates

Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

#135

Post by KeplerBoy » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 9:19 PM UTC

FireInsight wrote: post #117

crvdgc wrote: post #76

> imagine a folder full of skills that covers tasks like the following: > Where to get US census data from and how to understand its structure Reminds me of my first time using Wolfram Alpha and got blown away by its ability to use actual structured tools to solve the problem, compared to normal search engine. In fact, I tried again just now and am still amazed: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=what%27s+the+total…

When clicking your link, for me it opened the following query on Wolfram Alpha: `what%27s the total population of the United States%3F` Funnily enough, this was the result: `6.1% mod 3 °F (degrees Fahrenheit) (2015-2019 American Community Survey 5-year estimates)` I wonder how that was calculated...

Wolfram alpha never took input in such a natural language. But something like population(USA) and many variations thereof work.

Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

#136

Post by 827a » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 9:20 PM UTC

One idea I'm toying with right now: My company has some internal nodejs libraries, some of which are quite large (think: codegen API library, thousands of types). When a new version is published: task claude code to distill the entire library down to a skill, then bundle that in with the npm package. Then when the package is installed, postinstall a script that copies the skill from the dependency to the parent project that's doing the installing.

I'm still getting this set up, so I'm not sure yet if it'll lead to better outcomes. I'd say, there's reason to believe it might, but there's also reasons to believe it won't.

If the library is like 50,000 lines of code long, thousands of types, hundreds of helper functions, CC could just look into the node_modules folder and bundle all of this into its context. But, this might not be feasible, or be expensive; so the SKILL.md distills things down to help it get a high level understanding faster.

However, the flip side of that is: What if its too general? What if CC needs specific implementation details about one specific function? Is this actually better than CC engaging a two-step process of (1) looking at node_modules/my-lib/index.ts or README.md, get that high level understanding, then (2) look at node_modules/my-lib/specificFunction.ts to get the specific intel it needs? What value did the SKILL.md actually convey?

My feeling is that this concept of "human-specified context-specific skills" would convey the most value in situations where the model itself is constrained. E.g. you're working with a smaller open source model that doesn't have as comprehensive intrinsic knowledge of some library's surface, or doesn't have the context windows of larger models. But, for the larger models... its probably just better to rely on in-built model knowledge and code-as-context.

Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

#137

Post by lmeyerov » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 9:20 PM UTC

I'm a bit unclear what's different here from how vibe coders already work?

Pretty early on folks recognized that most MCPs can just be CLI commands, and a markdown file is fine for describing them. So Claude Code users have markdown files of CLI calls and mini tutorials on how to do things. The 'how to do things' part seems to be what we're now calling skills... Which we're still writing in markdown and using from Claude.

Is the new thing that Claude will match & add them to your context automatically vs you call them manually? And that's a breakthrough because there's some emergent behavior?

Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

#138

Post by magicalhippo » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 9:21 PM UTC

idk-92 wrote: post #108

crvdgc wrote: post #76

> imagine a folder full of skills that covers tasks like the following: > Where to get US census data from and how to understand its structure Reminds me of my first time using Wolfram Alpha and got blown away by its ability to use actual structured tools to solve the problem, compared to normal search engine. In fact, I tried again just now and am still amazed: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=what%27s+the+total…

tbh wolfram alpha was the craziest thing ever. haven't done much research on how this was implemented back in the day but to achieve what they did for such complex mathematical problems without AI was kind of nuts

Would really like something selfhosted that does the basic Wolfram Alpha math things.

Doesn't need the craziest math capability but standard symbolic math stuff like expression reduction, differentiation and integration of common equations, plotting, unit wrangling.

All with an easy to use text interface that doesn't require learning.

Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

#139

Post by simonw » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 9:21 PM UTC

roflcopter69 wrote: post #129

dist-epoch wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny thing, pseudo-XML is going through a big resurgence right now, because models love it, while they seriously struggle with JSON.

I'd be really interested in what you mean. Are the any studies that quantify this difference in model performance when using JSON or XML? What could be a good intuition for why there might be a big difference? If XML is better than JSON for LLMs, why isn't everyone and the grandma recommending me to use XML instead of JSON? Why is Google Gemini API offering structured output only with JSON schema instead of XML schem…

I don't know if the XML is better than JSON thing still holds with this year's frontier models, but it was definitely a thing last year. Here's Anthropic's documentation about that: https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/prompt-eng...

Note that they don't actually suggest that the XML needs to be VALID!

My guess was that JSON requires more characters to be escaped than XML-ish syntax does, plus matching opening and closing tags makes it a little easier for the LLM not to lose track of which string corresponds to which key.

Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

#140

Post by nwhnwh » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 9:22 PM UTC

zkmon wrote: post #93

AJRF wrote: post #82

This is a fairly negative comment, but putting it out there to see if other people are feeling the same thing If you told the median user of these services to set one of these up I think they would (correctly) look at you like you had two heads. People want to log in to an account, tell the thing to do something, and the system figures out the rest. MCP, Apps, Skills, Gems - all this stuff seems to be tackling the wr…

>> but deep problems aren't being solved There is no problem to solve. These days, solutions come in a package which includes the problems they intend to solve. You open the package. Now you have a problem that jumped out of the package and starts staring at you. The solution comes out of the package and chases the problem around the room. You are now technologically a more progressed human.

LOL, this is so true.