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Claude Skills

anthropic.com

141–150 of 443 posts

Re: Claude Skills

#141

So skills are basically preset system prompts, assuming different roles etc? Or is there more to it. I'm a little confused.

I'm super confused as well. This seems like exactly that, just some default prompt injections to chose from. I guess I kinda understand them in the context of their claude chat UI product.

By I don't understand why it's a thing in Claude Code tho when we already have Claude.md? Could also just point to any .md file in the prompt as preamble but not even needed. https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-pract...

That concept is also already perfectly specd in the MCP standard right? (Although not super used I think?) https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-06-18/ser...

Re: Claude Skills

#142
I fear the conceptual churn we're going to endure in the coming years will rival frontend dev.

Across ChatGPT and Claude we now have tools, functions, skills, agents, subagents, commands, and apps, and there's a metastasizing complex of vibe frameworks feeding on this mess.

Re: Claude Skills

#143
I just used tested the canvas-design skill and the results were pretty awful.

This is the skill description:

Create beautiful visual art in .png and .pdf documents using design philosophy. You should use this skill when the user asks to create a poster, piece of art, design, or other static piece. Create original visual designs, never copying existing artists' work to avoid copyright violations.

What it created was an abstract art museum-esque poster with random shapes and no discernable message. It may have been trying to design a playing card but just failed miserably which is my experience with most AI image generators.

It certainly spent a lot of time, and effort to create the poster. It asked initial questions, developed a plan, did research, created tooling - seems like a waste of "tokens" given how simple and lame the resulting image turned out.

Also after testing I still don't know how to "use" one of these skills in an actual chat.

Re: Claude Skills

#144

getting hard to keep up with skills, plugins, marketplaces, connectors, add-ons, yada yada

Thats the start of the singularity. The changes will keep accelerating and less and less people will be able to keep up until only the AIs themselves know how to use.

I don’t think these are things to keep up with. Those would be actual fundamental advances in the transformer architecture and core elements around it.

This stuff is like front end devs building fad add-ons which call into those core elements and falsely market themselves as fundamental advancements.

Re: Claude Skills

#145

The uptake on Claude-skills seems to have a lot of momentum already! I was fascinated on Tuesday by “Superpowers” , https://blog.fsck.com/2025/10/09/superpowers/ … and then packaged up all the tool-building I’ve been working on for awhile into somewhat tidy skills that i can delegate agents to: http://github.com/ryancnelson/deli-gator I’d love any feedback

Delegation is super cool. I can sometimes end up having too much Linear issue context coming in. IE frequently I want a Linear issue description and last comment retrieved. Linear MCP grabs all comments which pollutes the context and fills it up too much.

Re: Claude Skills

#146
post #37

I 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.

This is the crux of knowledge/tool enrichment in LLMs. The idea that we can have knowledge bases and LLMs will know WHEN to use them is a bit of a pipe dream right now.

Can you be more specific? The simple case seems to be solved, eg if I have an mcp for foo enabled and then ask about a list of foo, Claude will go and call the list function on foo.

Re: Claude Skills

#147
post #142

I fear the conceptual churn we're going to endure in the coming years will rival frontend dev. Across ChatGPT and Claude we now have tools, functions, skills, agents, subagents, commands, and apps, and there's a metastasizing complex of vibe frameworks feeding on this mess.

Metastasizing is such an excellent way to describe this phenomenon. They grow on top of each other.

Re: Claude Skills

#149
post #142

I fear the conceptual churn we're going to endure in the coming years will rival frontend dev. Across ChatGPT and Claude we now have tools, functions, skills, agents, subagents, commands, and apps, and there's a metastasizing complex of vibe frameworks feeding on this mess.

The same thing will happen: skilled people will do one thing well. I've zero interest in anything but Claude code in a dev container and, while mindful of the lethal trifecta, will give Claude as much access to a local dev environment and it's associated tooling as I would give to a junior developer.

Re: Claude Skills

#150
post #142

I fear the conceptual churn we're going to endure in the coming years will rival frontend dev. Across ChatGPT and Claude we now have tools, functions, skills, agents, subagents, commands, and apps, and there's a metastasizing complex of vibe frameworks feeding on this mess.

There's so much white space - this is the cost of a brand new technology. Similar issues with figuring out what cloud tools to use, or what python libraries are most relevant.

This is also why not everyone is an early adopter. There are mental costs involved in staying on top of everything.

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