It's amazing how writing optimal guides for llms or humans is exactly the same. Even if a human doesn't want to use a LLM these skills markdowns could work as tutorials.
Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
181–190 of 383 posts
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#182MCPs are overhyped and have limited value in my opinion. About 95% of the MCP servers out there are useless and can be replaced with a simple tool call.
I agree the big deal is tool calling.
But MCP has at least 2 advantages over cli tools
- Tool calling LLM combined w/ structured output is easier to implement as MCP than CLI for complex interactions IMO.
- It is more natural to hold state between tool calls in an MCP server than with a CLI.
When I read the OT, I initially wondered if I indeed bought into the hype. But then I realized that the small demo I built recently to learn about MCP (https://github.com/cournape/text2synth) would have been more difficult to build as a cli. And I think the demo is representative of neat usages of MCP.
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of it is that they gave a name to a useful pattern that people had already been discovering independently. Names are important, because they mean we can start having higher quality conversations about the pattern. Anthropic also realized that this pattern solves one of the persistent problems with coding agents: context pollution. You need to stuff as little material as possible into the context to enable the to…
It's baffling to me. I was already making API calls and embedding context and various instructions precisely using backticks with "md". Is this really all this is? What am I missing? I don't even understand how this "feature" merits a press release from Anthropic, let alone a blog post extolling it.
I was puzzled by the announcement and remain puzzled after this blog post. I thought everyone knew you could keep use case specific context files handy.
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of it is that they gave a name to a useful pattern that people had already been discovering independently. Names are important, because they mean we can start having higher quality conversations about the pattern. Anthropic also realized that this pattern solves one of the persistent problems with coding agents: context pollution. You need to stuff as little material as possible into the context to enable the to…
How is it different from subagents?
They complement each other.
Subagents are mainly a token context optimization hack. They're a way for Claude Code to run a bunch of extra tools calls (e.g. to investigate the source of a bug) without consuming many tokens in the parent agent loop - the subagent gets its own loop, can use up to ~240,000 tokens exploring a problem and can then reply back up to the parent agent with a short description of what it did or what it figured out.
A subagent might use one or more skills as part of running.
A skill might advise Claude Code on how best to use subagents to solve a problem.
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#185I've been able to build the equivalent of skills with a few markdown files. I need to remind my agent every so often to use a skill but usually once per session at most. I don't get what's so special about Claude doing this?
Part of it is that they gave a name to a useful pattern that people had already been discovering independently. Names are important, because they mean we can start having higher quality conversations about the pattern. Anthropic also realized that this pattern solves one of the persistent problems with coding agents: context pollution. You need to stuff as little material as possible into the context to enable the to…
Strong disagreement on the helpfulness of the name- if anything calling a context file a skill is really misleading. It evokes something like a LoRA or pluggable modality. Skill is the wrong name imo
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#186is there a community share directory of Claude skills somewhere yet? sounds promising
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of it is that they gave a name to a useful pattern that people had already been discovering independently. Names are important, because they mean we can start having higher quality conversations about the pattern. Anthropic also realized that this pattern solves one of the persistent problems with coding agents: context pollution. You need to stuff as little material as possible into the context to enable the to…
It's baffling to me. I was already making API calls and embedding context and various instructions precisely using backticks with "md". Is this really all this is? What am I missing? I don't even understand how this "feature" merits a press release from Anthropic, let alone a blog post extolling it.
A few things:
1. By giving this name a pattern, people can have higher level conversations about it.
2. There is a small amount of new software here. Claude Code and https://claude.ai/ both now scan their skills/ folders on startup and extract a short piece of metadata about each skill from the YAML at the top of those markdown files. They then know that if the user e.g. says they want to create a PDF they should "cat skills/pdf/skill.md" first before proceeding with the task.
3. This is a new standard for distributing skills, which are sometimes just a markdown file but can also be a folder with a markdown file and one or more additional scripts or reference documents. The example skills here should help illustrate that: https://github.com/anthropics/skills/tree/main/document-skil... and https://github.com/anthropics/skills/tree/main/artifacts-bui...
I think the pattern itself is really neat, because it's an acknowledgement that a great way to give an LLM system additional "skills" is to describe them in a markdown file packaged alongside some relevant scripts.
It's also pleasantly vendor-neutral: other tools like Codex CLI can use these skills already (just tell them to go read skills/pdfs/skill.md and follow those instructions) and I expect they may well add formal support in the future, if this takes off as I expect it will.
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#188Does anyone else still keep everything super simple by just including .md files in project for guardrails and do all edits manually by file upload and clipboard?
Sure, it's tedious, but I get to directly observe every change.
I guess I just don't feel comfortable with more black box magic beyond the LLM itself.
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of it is that they gave a name to a useful pattern that people had already been discovering independently. Names are important, because they mean we can start having higher quality conversations about the pattern. Anthropic also realized that this pattern solves one of the persistent problems with coding agents: context pollution. You need to stuff as little material as possible into the context to enable the to…
Strong disagreement on the helpfulness of the name- if anything calling a context file a skill is really misleading. It evokes something like a LoRA or pluggable modality. Skill is the wrong name imo
I think skill is the perfect name for this. You provide the LLM with a new skill by telling it how to do a thing and providing supporting scripts to help it do that thing.
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#190Does anyone else still keep everything super simple by just including .md files in project for guardrails and do all edits manually by file upload and clipboard? Sure, it's tedious, but I get to directly observe every change. I guess I just don't feel comfortable with more black box magic beyond the LLM itself.
I just upload the file I want to change and the file with associated tests. Anything more than that and the ROI goes way down on slop generated. But I'll admit Gemini at least is getting good at "implement the function with a TODO describing what needs to be done". No need for anything but the Gemini file uploader, and copy pasting the results if they look good.