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Claude Skills

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude Skills

#281

Post by handoflixue »

kingkongjaffa wrote: post #229
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/

when do you need to make a skill vs a project?

Skills can be toggled on and off, which is good for context management, especially on larger / less frequently needed skills

Currently if a project is 5% or less capacity, it will auto-load all files, so skills also give you a way to avoid that capacity limit. For larger projects, Claude has to search files, which can be unreliable, so skills will again be useful for an explicit "always load this"

Re: Claude Skills

#282

Post by FrostKiwi »

_pdp_ wrote: post #217

I predict there will be some sort of package manager opensource project soon. Download skills from some 3rd-party website and run inside Claude. Risks of supply chain issue will be obvious but nobody will care - at least not in the short term.

They already have the Plugin Marketplace [1]. It's all too much of a fast moving target for something as rigid as a package manager I think. Open source projects for now will be limited to Awesome-* collections [2]

[1] https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/plugin-marketpla...

[2] https://github.com/hesreallyhim/awesome-claude-code

Re: Claude Skills

#283

Post by jwpapi »

simonw wrote: post #267
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 fro…

In October we had Aider, which is more useful to me then Claude Code, as it allows more targeted changes and faster switching between models, modes and into my personal typing.

Not just Claude Code, but all these tools are just better in generating more slop, which is generating more effort in your codebase in the future. Making it less agile, harder to maintain and harder to extend without breaking.

I still haven’t found a useful usage of MCP for me, if i want tool calling I get a structured response by the AI and then do a normal API call. I don’t need nor want the AI to have access to all these calls it’s just too unreliable.

I’m really just sharing my personal preference as I also prefer a pedal bin over an electric one as there is delay in the later and you have the exchange batteries, whilst the first just always works.

The main issue with AI to me is reliability and all that happens is we give it more and more power. This might work out or stall us.

For me personally I don’t feel much improvement and I cant share the hype anymore, whilst I’m still more then grateful for the opportunity to live at this time and have AI teach me decent skills in a wide range of topics and accelerate my learning curve.

Re: Claude Skills

#284

Post by absturtles »

xpe wrote: post #62
hansonkd wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

abstractions all the way down: abstraction abstraction abstraction abstraction ...

... absturtles

Re: Claude Skills

#285

Post by larrymcp »

Imnimo wrote: 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.

> starting from ground zero

You probably mean "starting from square one" but yeah I get you

Re: Claude Skills

#286

Post by kvirani »

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:…

How does it call upon the correct skill from a vast library of skills at the right time? Is this where RAG via embeddings / vector search come in? My mental model is still weak in this area, I admit.

Re: Claude Skills

#287

Post by stevenpetryk »

anomaloustho wrote: post #123
mediaman wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wrote elsewhere but I’m more interpreting this distinction as “RL in real-time” vs “RL beforehand”.

This is referred to as “online reinforcement learning” and is already something done by, for example Cursor for their tab prediction model.

https://cursor.com/blog/tab-rl

Re: Claude Skills

#288

Post by eru »

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.

AI tools can help you with the churn.

AI will help you solve problems you wouldn't have without AI.

Re: Claude Skills

#289

Post by vinhnx »

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/

I think "Skill" is a subset of developer instruction, in which translates to AGENTS.md (or Claude.md). Today to add capability to an AI, all we need a good set of .md files and a AGENTS.md as the base.

Re: Claude Skills

#290

Post by visarga »

kvirani wrote: post #286
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:…

How does it call upon the correct skill from a vast library of skills at the right time? Is this where RAG via embeddings / vector search come in? My mental model is still weak in this area, I admit.

I think it has a compact table of contents of all the skills it can call preloaded. It's not RAG, it navigates based on references between files, like a coding agent.
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