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Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

simonwillison.net

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

#141

Post by delaminator »

Seattle3503 wrote: post #56

Maybe I'm just dumb, but it isn't clear how to manage my skills for Claude Code. All the docs are for the web version. Eg I don't know where to put a skill that can be used across all projects

As a bonus you can get Claude to create the SKILL.md file itself.

Which kind of sounds pointless if Claude already knows what to do, why create a document?

My examples - I interact with ElasticSearch and Claude keeps forgetting it is version 5.2 and we need to use the appropriate REST API. So I got it to create a SKILL.md about what we used and provided examples.

And the next one was getting it to write instructions on how to use ImageMagik on Windows, with examples and trouble shooting, rather than it trying to use the Linux versions over and over.

Skills are the solution the problems I have been having. And came just at the right time as I already spent half of last week making similar documents !

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

#142

Post by 3abiton »

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.

I wish this was wrong, but it really isn't. To contrast though, I would argue that is part of evolution? We just want to do things faster or better? Smartphones solved no problems, but they ushered the digital millenium.

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

#143

Post by simonw »

lmeyerov wrote: post #137

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 Cl…

I think skills are mainly just a formalization of the markdown plus CLI patterns that people have been using already.

The only material difference with skills is that Claude knows to scan them for YAML descriptions on startup, which means it can trigger them by itself more easily.

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

#144

Post by hansmayer »

Reads like a sloppily disguised influencer blog post really. The feature has just been released and the author already knows they are going to be a "bigger deal than the MCP"? Although he proceeds to discredit the MCP as too complex to be able to take off towards the end of the article. Not very useful examples either, which author publishes with a bit of distancing, disclaimer almost - who the hell has time to create lousy slack gifs? And if you do, you'll probably not want the lousy ones. So yeah, let's not immediately declare this as "great", lets see how it fares in general and revisit in a few months.

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

#146

Post by simonw »

hansmayer wrote: post #144

Reads like a sloppily disguised influencer blog post really. The feature has just been released and the author already knows they are going to be a "bigger deal than the MCP"? Although he proceeds to discredit the MCP as too complex to be able to take off towards the end of the article. Not very useful examples either, which author publishes with a bit of distancing, disclaimer almost - who the hell has time to creat…

What is an "influencer blog post"?

I didn't say that MCP was too complex to take off - it clearly took off despite that complexity.

I'm predicting skills will take off even more. If I'm wrong feel free to call me out in a few months time for making a bad prediction!

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

#147

Post by zkmon »

3abiton wrote: post #142
zkmon wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

I wish this was wrong, but it really isn't. To contrast though, I would argue that is part of evolution? We just want to do things faster or better? Smartphones solved no problems, but they ushered the digital millenium.

I think most new technologies helped to increase the expectations about what you can do. But overall work did not get reduced. It didn't give me more free time to go fishing, or bird-watching. On the other hand, I got an irreversible dependency on these things. Otherwise I'm are no longer compatible with the World 2.0

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

#148

Post by tasuki »

dist-epoch wrote: post #91
joelthelion wrote: post #54

Reminds me of xml vs json. Xml was big and professional, json was simple and easy to use. We all know who won...

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

What is pseudo-XML?

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

#149

Post by phs318u »

globular-toast wrote: post #127
idk-92 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Wolfram Alpha is AI. It's just not an LLM. AI has been a thing since the 60s. LLMs will also become "not AI" in a few years probably.

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. The marketing that LLM=AI seems to have been interpreted as “_only_ LLM=AI”

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

#150

Post by quentindanjou »

phlakaton wrote: post #101
darth_avocado wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What if the great boon of AI is to get us to do all the thinking and writing we should have been doing all along? What if the next group of technologists to end up on top are... the technical writers ? Haha, just kidding you tech bros, AI's still for you, and this time you'll get to shove the nerds into a locker for sure. ;-)

It might not be that wrong. After all, programming languages are a way to communicate with the machine. In the same way we are not doing binary manually, we might simply not have to do programming too. I think software architecture is likely to be what it should be: the most important part of every piece of software.
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