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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

#281

Post by evanmoran »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #194
dinkleberg wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very obvious statement, but good MCP servers can be really good, and bad MCP servers can actively make things significantly worse. The problem is that most MCP servers are in the latter category. As is often the case, every product team is told that MCP is the hot new thing and they have to create an MCP server for their customers. And I've seen that customers do indeed ask for these things, because they al…

There's some extra irony here: many of those product teams don't realize that AI is not something they can have within their product. If something like MCP is a good fit for them, even a little, then their product is actually a feature of the AI. Agentic LLMs are, in a way, an attempt to commoditize entire service classes, across the board, all at once. Personally, I welcome it. I keep saying that a lot of successful…

Thank you. This is beautiful said. I will also add that I don’t think chat bots are the final product, so it leaves the open question which product is the last one not being commoditized.

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

#282

Post by cma »

f38zf5vdt wrote: post #174
simonw wrote: post #170

Earlier 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.

If also seems to be the same thing as subagents, but without clearing context, right?

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

#283

Post by uxcolumbo »

joquarky wrote: post #188

Does 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.

Don’t quite follow.

So you only use the chat UI and copy and paste from there?

Or do you use CC but don’t let it automatically update files?

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

#285

Post by hansmayer »

simonw wrote: post #158
hansmayer wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I didn't say that MCP was too complex to take off - it clearly took off despite that complexity. I did not say you said exactly that either. Read more carefully. I said you were discrediting them by implying they were too complex to take off due to resource and complexity constraints. It's clearly stated in the relevant section of your post ( https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/claude-skills/#skills-... ) >I'm pr…

> How the hell can you predict they will "take off even more" when the feature is accessible for barely 24 hours at this point? That's what a prediction IS. If I waited until the feature had proven itself it wouldn't be much of a prediction. The feature has also been live for more than 24 hours. I reverse-engineered it a week ago: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/10/claude-skills/ - and it's been invisibly powering…

> That's what a prediction IS. If I waited until the feature had proven itself it wouldn't be much of a prediction.

No, that's merely guessing mate. Predictions are, at least in modern meaning, based on at least some data and some extrapolation model that more or less reliably predicts the development of your known dataset into future (uknown) values. I don't see you presenting either in your post, so that's not predicting, that's in the best of cases guessing, and in the worst of cases irresponsible distribution of Anthropic's propaganda.

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

#286

Post by henrebotha »

neilv wrote: post #257
michael1999 wrote: post #203

We're doing something like this internally. Our monorepo context files were much too big, so we built a progressive tree of fragments to load up for different tasks. I am struck by how much these kinds of context documents resemble normal developer documentation, but actually useful and task-oriented. What was the barrier to creating these documents before? Three theories on why this is so different: 1) The feedback…

> 2) The tools can help build them. Building good docs was always hard. Especially if you take the time to include examples, urls, etc. that make the documentation truly useful. These tools reduce this cost. I would just be a little cautious about this, for a few reasons: (a) an expectation of lots of examples and such can increase the friction to capturing anything at all; (b) this can encourage AI slop bloat that i…

> migrating all the doc that's strewn all over random SaaSes that people dropped it

I would love to be able to share our internal "all the things that are wrong with our approach to documentation" wiki page. It's longer than you could possibly imagine, probably more than 15 years old at this point, and filled to the brim with sarcasm and despair. It's so fucking funny. The table of contents is several pages long.

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

#287

Post by jychang »

evanmoran wrote: post #280
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your LLMs get rid of comments? Mine add them incessantly.

I know this is highly controversial, but I now leave the comments in. My theory is that the “probability space” the LLM is writing code in can’t help but write them, so if i leave them next LLM that reads the code will start in the same space. Maybe it’s too much, but currently I just want the code to be right and I’ve let go of the exact wording of comments/variables/types to move faster.

I think the code comments straight up just help understanding, whether human or AI.

There's a piece of common knowledge that NBA basketball players can all hit over 90% on free throws, if they shot underhand (granny style). But for pride reasons, they don't throw underhand. Shaq just shot 52%, even though it'd be free points if he could easily shoot better.

I suspect there's similar things in software engineering. I've seen plenty of comments on HN about "adding code comments like a junior software engineer" or similar sentiment. Sure, there's legitimate gripes about comments (like how they can be misleading if you update the code without changing the comment, etc), but I strongly suspect they increase comprehension of code overall.

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

#288

Post by globular-toast »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #221
globular-toast wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look into something like Prolog (~50 years old) to see how systems can be built from rules rather than it/else statements. It wasn't all imperative programming before LLMs. If you mean that it all breaks down to if/else at some level then, yeah, but that goes for LLMs too. LLMs aren't the quantum leap people seem to think they are.

They are from the user POV. Not necessarily in a good way. The whole point of algorithmic AI was that it was deterministic and - if the algorithm was correct - reliable. I don't think anyone expected that soft/statistical linguistic/dimensional reasoning would be used as a substitute for hard logic. It has its uses, but it's still a poor fit for many problems.

Yeah, the result is pretty cool. It's probably how it felt to eat pizza for the first time. People had been grinding grass seeds into flour, mixing with water and putting it on hot stones for millennia. Meanwhile others had been boiling fruits into pulp and figuring out how to make milk curdle in just the right way. Bring all of that together and, boom, you have the most popular food in the world.

We're still at the stage of eating pizza for the first time. It'll take a little while to remember that you can do other things with bread and wheat, or even other foods entirely.

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

#289

Post by rane »

So far not impressed with CC's ability to invoke skills automatically.

I made a skill with the unambiguous description: "Use when creating or editing bash scripts"

Yet, Claude does not invoke the skill when asked to write a bash script.

https://gist.github.com/raine/528f97375e125cf97a8f8b415bfd80...

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