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Claude Skills

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude Skills

#241

Post by samrus »

mediaman wrote: post #111
mbesto wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Which is precisely why Richard Sutton doesn't think LLMs will evolve to AGI[0]. LLMs are based on mimicry, not experience, so it's more likely (according to Sutton) that AGI will be based on some form of RL (reinforcement learning) and not neural networks (LLMs). Mor…

It's a false dichotomy. LLMs are already being trained with RL to have goal directedness. He is right that non-RL'd LLMs are just mimicry, but the field already moved beyond that.

The LLMs dont have RL baked into them. They need that at the token prediction level to be able to do the sort of things humans can do

Re: Claude Skills

#242

Post by libraryofbabel »

judahmeek wrote: post #235
libraryofbabel wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the classic blog post, by Thorsten Ball, from way back in the AI Stone Age (April this year): https://ampcode.com/how-to-build-an-agent It uses Go, which is more verbose than Python would be, so he takes 300 lines to do it. Also, his edit_file tool could be a lot simpler (I just make my minimal agent "edit" files by overwriting the entire existing file). I keep meaning to write a similar blog post with Python…

> I keep meaning to write a similar blog post with Python... Just have your agent do it.

I could, but I'm actually rather snobbish about my writing and don't believe in having LLMs write first drafts (for proofreading and editing, they're great).

(I am not snobbish about my code. If it works and is solid and maintainable I don't care if I wrote it or not. Some people seem to feel a sense of loss when an LLM writes code for them, because of The Craft or whatever. That's not me; I don't have my identity wrapped up in my code. Maybe I did when I was more junior, but I've been in this game long enough to just let it go.)

Re: Claude Skills

#243

Post by lukev »

fny wrote: 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 cool part is that none of any of this is actually that big or difficult. You can master it on-demand, or build your own substitutes if necessary.

Yeah, if you chase buzzword compliance and try to learn all these things outside of a particular use case you're going to burn out and have a bad time. So... don't?

Re: Claude Skills

#244

Post by timcobb »

simonw wrote: post #225

Just published this about skills: "Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP" https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/claude-skills/

then submit it, you don't need to post here about it

Re: Claude Skills

#246

Post by pattobrien »

JyB wrote: post #151
mercurialsolo wrote: post #133

Sub 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?

MCP Prompts are meant to be user triggered, whereas I believe a Skill is meant to be an LLM-triggered, use-case centric set of instructions for a specific task.

  - MCP Prompt: "Please solve GitHub Issue #{issue_id}"
  - Skills:
    - React Component Development (React best practices, accessible tools)
    - REST API Endpoint Development
    - Code Review
This will probably result in:

  - Single "CLAUDE.md" instructions are broken out into discoverable instructions that the LLM will dynamically utilize based on the user's prompt
  - rather than having direct access to Tools, Claude will always need to go through Skill instructions first (making context tighter since it cant use Tools without understanding \*how\* to use them to achieve a certain goal)
  - Clients will be able to add infinite MCP servers / tools, since the Tools themselves will no longer all be added to the context window
It's basically a way to decouple User prompts from direct raw Tool access, which actually makes a ton of sense when you think of it.

Re: Claude Skills

#247

Post by arjie »

tomComb wrote: post #216
arjie wrote: post #98

It's pretty neat that they're adding these things. In my projects, I have a `bin/claude` subdirectory where I ask it to put scripts etc. that it builds. In the claude.md I then note that it should look there for tools. It does a pretty good job of this. To be honest, the thing I most need are context-management helpers like "start a claude with this set of MCPs, then that set, and so on". Instead right now I have sep…

> the thing I most need are context-management helpers like "start a claude with this set of MCPs, then that set, and so on". Isn’t that sub agents?

Ah, in my case, I want to just talk to a video-editing Claude, and then a sys-admin Claude, and so on. I don't want to go through a main Claude who will instantiate these guys. I want to talk to the particular Claudes myself. But if sub-agents work for this, then maybe I just haven't been using them well.

Re: Claude Skills

#248

Post by stego-tech »

I’m kind of in stitches over this. Claude’s “skills” are dependent upon developers writing competent documentation and keeping it up to date…which most seemingly can’t even do for actual code they write, nevermind a brute-force black box like an LLM.

For those few who do write competent documentation and have well-organized file systems and the risk tolerance to allow LLMs to run roughshod over data, sure, there’s some potential here. Though if you’re already that far in, you’d likely be better off farming that grunt work to a Junior as a learning exercise than an LLM, especially since you’ll have to cleanup the output anyhow.

With the limited context windows of LLMs, you can never truly get this sort of concept to “stick” like you can with a human, and if you’re training an agent for this specific task anyway, you’re effectively locking yourself to that specific LLM in perpetuity rather than a replaceable or promotable worker.

Just…it makes me giggle, how optimistic they are that stars would align at scale like that in an organization.

Re: Claude Skills

#249

Post by hu3 »

timcobb wrote: post #244
simonw wrote: post #225

Just published this about skills: "Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP" https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/claude-skills/

then submit it, you don't need to post here about it

i found it useful and coinstructive to post it here also.

no reason not to.

Re: Claude Skills

#250

Post by siva7 »

fny wrote: 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.

It feels like every week these companies release some new product that feels very similar to what they released a week before. Can the employees at Anthropic even tell themselves what the difference is?
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