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Claude Skills

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude Skills

#271

Post by canyon289 »

dlivingston wrote: post #189
libraryofbabel wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:…

> 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. Definitely want to try this out. Any resources / etc. on getting started?

I wrote a post here with zero abstractions. Its all self contained and runs locally.

https://ravinkumar.com/GenAiGuidebook/language_models/Agents... https://github.com/canyon289/ai_agent_basics/blob/main/noteb...

Re: Claude Skills

#272

Post by ewoodrich »

kmacdough wrote: post #154
dingnuts wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explain something to me that I've long wondered: how does Reinforcement Learning work if you cannot measure your distance from the goal? In other words, how can RL be used for literally anything qualitative?

This is one of known hardest parts of RL. The short answer is human feedback. But this is easier said than done. Current models require vastly more learning events than humans, making direct supervision infeasable. One strategy is to train models on human supervisors, so they can bear the bulk of the supervision. This is tricky, but has proven more effective than direct supervision. But, in my experience, AIs don't s…

Whenever I watch Claude Code or Codex get stuck trying to force a square peg into a round hole and failing over and over it makes me wish that they could feel the creeping sense of uncertainty and dread a human would in that situation after failure after failure.

Which eventually forces you to take a step back and start questioning basic assumptions until (hopefully) you get a spark of realization of the flaws in your original plan, and then recalibrate based on that new understanding and tackle it totally differently.

But instead I watch Claude struggling to find a directory it expects to see and running random npm commands until it comes to the conclusion that, somehow, node_modules was corrupted mysteriously and therefore it needs to wipe everything node related and manually rebuild the project config by vague memory.

Because no big deal, if it’s wrong it’s the human's problem to untangle and Anthropic gets paid either way so why not try?

Re: Claude Skills

#273

Post by SafeDusk »

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.

That is why a minimal framework[1] that allows me to understand the core immutable loop, but to quickly experiment with all these imperative concepts is invaluable.

I was able to try Beads[1] quickly with my framework and decided I like it enough to keep it. If I don't like it, just drop it, they're composable.

[0]: https://github.com/aperoc/toolkami.git [1]: https://github.com/steveyegge/beads

Re: Claude Skills

#274

Post by jadenPete »

What benefit do skills over beyond writing good, human-centric documentation and either checking it into your codebase or making it accessible via an MCP server?

Re: Claude Skills

#275

Post by DrewADesign »

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.

Not to mention GANs, RAGs, context decoupling, prompt matrices, NAGGLs, first-class keywords, reverse token interrupts, agentic singletons, parallel context bridges…

… jk… I’ll bet at least one person was like “ah, damnit, what did I miss…” for a second.

Re: Claude Skills

#276

Post by colordrops »

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…

Why wouldn't you turn on prompt caching? There must be a reason why it's a toggle rather than just being on for everything.

Re: Claude Skills

#277

Post by dcre »

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…

When decent docs (and various other kinds of pro-developer infrastructure listed by simonw here https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/7/vibe-engineering/) are required for LLMs to work well, it's a very tangible incentive to do them better and ironically makes for an easier sell to management.

Re: Claude Skills

#278

Post by mcfry »

This is just... rebranding for instructions and files? lol. Love how instructions for creating a skill is buried. Marketing go brr.

Re: Claude Skills

#279

Post by TimMoore »

colordrops wrote: post #276
libraryofbabel wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why wouldn't you turn on prompt caching? There must be a reason why it's a toggle rather than just being on for everything.

Writing to the cache is more expensive than a request with caching disabled. So it only makes economic sense to do it when you know you're going to use the cached results. See https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/prompt-cac...

Re: Claude Skills

#280

Post by [deleted] »

colordrops wrote: post #276
libraryofbabel wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why wouldn't you turn on prompt caching? There must be a reason why it's a toggle rather than just being on for everything.

[deleted]
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