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Claude Skills

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude Skills

#261

Post by rbjorklin »

stego-tech wrote: post #248

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 so…

Just went to the comments searching for a comment like yours and I'm surprised it seems to be the only one calling this out. My take on this is also that "Skills" is just detailed documentation, which like you correctly point out, basically never exist for any project. Maybe LLM skills will be the thing that finally makes us all write detailed documentation but I kind of doubt it.

Re: Claude Skills

#262

Post by apsurd »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #239
apsurd wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when you say prompt caching, does it mean cache the thing you send to the llm or the thing you get back? sounds like prompt is what you send, and caching is important here because what you send is derived from previous responses from llm calls earlier? sorry to sound dense, I struggle to understand where and how in the mental model the non-determinism of a response is dealt with. is it just that it's all cached?

Not dense to ask questions! There are two separate concepts in play: 1) Maintaining the state of the "conversation" history with the LLM. LLMs are stateless, so you have to store the entire series of interactions on the client side in your agent (every user prompt, every LLM response, every tool call, every tool call result). You then send the entire previous conversation history to the LLM every time you call it, so…

Very helpful. It helps me better understand the specifics behind each call and response, the internal units and whether those units are sent and received "live" from the LLM or come from a traditional db or cache store.

I'm personally just curious how far, clever, insightful, any given product is "on top of" the foundation models. I'm not in it deep enough to make claims one way or the other.

So this shines a little more light, thanks!

Re: Claude Skills

#263

Post by hiq »

lukev wrote: post #106
hiq wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, don't, don't keep up. Just like "best practices in prompt engineering", these are just temporary workaround for current limitations, and they're bound to disappear quickly. Unless you really need the extra performance right now, just wait until models get you this performance out of the box instead of investing into learning something that'll be obsolete in months.

I agree with your conclusion not to sweat all these features too much, but only because they're not hard at all to understand on demand once you realize that they all boil down to a small handful of ways to manipulate model context. But context engineering very much not going anywhere as a discipline. Bigger and better models will by no means make it obsolete. In fact, raw model capability is pretty clearly leveling…

My point is that there'll be some layer doing that for you. We already have LLMs writing plans for another LLM to execute, and many other such orchestrations, to reduce the constraints on the actual human input. Those implementing this layer need to develop this context engineering; those simply using LLM-based products do not, as it'll be done for them somewhat transparently, eventually. Similar to how not every software engineer needs to be a compiler expert to run a program.

Re: Claude Skills

#264

Post by simonw »

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…

I think those three concepts complement each other quite neatly.

MCPs can wrap APIs to make them usable by an LLM agent.

Skills offer a context-efficient way to make extra instructions available to the agent only when it needs them. Some of those instructions might involve telling it how best to use the MCPs.

Sub-agents are another context management pattern, this time allowing a parent agent to send a sub-agent off on a mission - optimally involving both skills and MCPs - while saving on tokens in that parent agent.

Re: Claude Skills

#265

Post by xnx »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #180
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.

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:…

Might as well include agent2agent in there: https://developers.googleblog.com/en/a2a-a-new-era-of-agent-...

Re: Claude Skills

#266

Post by simonw »

tgtweak wrote: post #202
antiloper wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the hack? Instead of typing `zip -r mnt.zip /mnt` into bash, you type `Create a zip file of /mnt` in claude code. It's the same thing running as the same user.

Skills run remotely in the llm environment, not locally on your system running claude - worth noting.

If you use skills with Claude Code they run directly on your computer.

If you use them inside the Claude.ai or Claude mobile apps they run in a container in the cloud, hosted by Anthropic.

Re: Claude Skills

#267

Post by simonw »

jwpapi wrote: post #256

I’m really fatigued by all these releases. Honestly no offense, but for me nothing really changed in the last 12 months. It’s not one particular mistake by a company but everything is just so overhyped with little substance. Skills to me is basically providing a read-only md file with guidelines. Which can be useful but somehow I don’t use it as maintaining my guidelines is more work then just writing a better prompt…

12 months ago we didn't have Claude Code or Codex CLI - in fact the whole category of "coding agents" was very thin.

The only "reasoning" model was the o1 preview.

We didn't have MCP, but that wasn't a big deal because the models were mostly pretty weak at tool calling anyway.

The DeepSeek moment hadn't happened yet - the best available open weights models were from Mistral and Llama and were nowhere close to the frontier hosted models.

The LLM landscape feels radically different to me now compared to October last year.

Re: Claude Skills

#269

Post by simonw »

stego-tech wrote: post #248

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 so…

LLMs reward developers who can write. Maybe that's one of the reasons so many developers are pushing back against them!
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