I’ll give it a fair go, but how is it not going to have the same problem of _maybe_ using MCP tools? The same problem of trying to add to your prompt “only answer if you are 100% correct”? A skill just sounds like more markdown that is fed into context, but with a cool name that sounds impressive, and some indexing of the defined skills on start (same as MCP tools?)
Claude Skills
171–180 of 443 posts
Re: Claude Skills
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> This is also why not everyone is an early adopter. Usually, there are relatively few adopters of a new technology. But with LLMs, it's quite the opposite: there was a huge number of early adopters. Some got extremely excited and run hundreds of agents all the time, some got burned and went back to the good old ways of doing things, whereas the majority is just using LLMs from time to time for various tasks, bigger…
I follow your reasoning. If we just look at businesses, and we include every business that pays money for AI and one or more employees use AI to do their their jobs, then we're in the Early Majority phase, not the Innovator or Early Adopter phases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle
Re: Claude Skills
#173Great, so now I can script the IDE...err, I mean LLM. I can't help but feel like we've been here before, and the magic is wearing thin.
Re: Claude Skills
#174wow, this news post layout is not fitting the screen on mobile... Couldnt these 10x programmers vibecode a proper mobile version?
Re: Claude Skills
#175I 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.
Just wait until I can pull in just the concepts I want with "GPT Package Manager." I can simply call `gptpm add skills` and the LLM package manager will add the Skills package to my GPT. What could go wrong?
Re: Claude Skills
#176Sub agents, mcp, skills - wonder how are they supposed to interact with each other? Feels like fair bit of overlap here. It's ok to proceed in a direction where you are upgrading the spec and enabling claude wth additional capabilities. But one can pretty much use any of these approaches and end up with the same capability for an agent. Right now feels like a ux upgrade from mcp where you need a json but instead can…
Claude Skills just seem to be the same as MCP prompts: https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-06-18/ser... I don't really see why they had to create a different concept. Maybe makes sense "marketing-wise" for their chat UI, but in Claude Code? Especially when CLAUDE.md is a thing?
Narrowly focused semantics/affordances (for both LLM and users/future package managers/communities, ease of redistribution and context management:
- skills are plain files that are injected contextually whereas prompts would come w the overhead of live, running code that has to be installed just right into your particular env, to provide a whole mcp server. Tbh prompts also seem to be more about literal prompting, too
- you could have a thousand skills folders for different softwares etc but good luck with having more than a few mcp servers that are loaded into context w/o it clobbering the context
Re: Claude Skills
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> […] and then ask about a list of foo
Not OP, but this is the part that I take issue with. I want to forget what tools are there and have the LLM figure out on its own which tool to use. Having to remember to add special words to encourage it to use specific tools (required a lot of the time, especially with esoteric tools) is annoying. I’m not saying this renders the whole thing “useless” because it’s good to have some idea of what you’re doing to guide the LLM anyway, but I wish it could do better here.
Re: Claude Skills
#178So 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-p…
Claude.md gets read every time and eats context, while it sounds like the skills are read as-needed, saving context.
Re: Claude Skills
#179AGI nowhere near
I know I'm replying to a shitpost. But I had a realisation, and I'm probably not the only one.
If you can manage to keep structuring slightly intelligent tools so that they compound, seems like AGI is achievable.
That's why the thing everyone is after right now is new ways to make those slight intelligences keep compounding.
Just like repeated multiplication of 1.001 grows indefinitely.
Re: Claude Skills
#180I 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.
You forgot mcp-everything!
Yes, it's a mess, and there will be a lot of churn, you're not wrong, but there are foundational concepts underneath it all that you can learn and then it's easy to fit insert-new-feature into your mental model. (Or you can just ignore the new features, and roll your own tools. Some people here do that with a lot of success.)
The foundational mental model to get the hang of is really just:
* An LLM
* ...called in a loop
* ...maintaining a history of stuff it's done in the session (the "context")
* ...with access to tool calls to do things. Like, read files, write files, call bash, etc.
Some people call this "the agentic loop." Call it what you want, you can write it in 100 lines of Python. I encourage every programmer I talk to who is remotely curious about LLMs to try that. It is a lightbulb moment.
Once you've written your own basic agent, if a new tool comes along, you can easily demystify it by thinking about how you'd implement it yourself. For example, Claude Skills are really just:
1) Skills are just a bunch of files with instructions for the LLM in them.
2) Search for the available "skills" on startup and put all the short descriptions into the context so the LLM knows about them.
3) Also tell the LLM how to "use" a skill. Claude just uses the `bash` tool for that.
4) When Claude wants to use a skill, it uses the "call bash" tool to read in the skill files, then does the thing described in them.
and that's more or less it, glossing over a lot of things that are important but not foundational like ensuring granular tool permissions, etc.