301–310 of 443 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The classic "you're doing it wrong" response to criticism.
The classic "the only thing LLM proponents ever say is "you're doing it wrong"" response!
Keep up the good work, Simon. I admire your boundless optimism and curiosity--and your willingness to educate us all.
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.
Im not interested in any system that require me to write a document begging an LLM to follow instructions, only to have it randomly ignore those instructions whenever its convenient.
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.
Architectural churn brought to you by VC funded marketing. Im not interested in any system that require me to write a document begging an LLM to follow instructions, only to have it randomly ignore those instructions whenever its convenient.
Putting a list of short blurbs pointing Claude Code at a set of extra, longer sets of CLAUDE.md style information was being used to prevent auto loading that context until it was needed.
Instead of assuming this is just change for the sake of change, it’s actually a nice way to support a usage pattern that many of us found works well already
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.
Just published this about skills: "Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP" https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/claude-skills/
Skills are cool, but to me it's more of a design pattern / prompt engineering trick than something in need of a hard spec. You can even implement it in an MCP - I've been doing it for a while: "Before doing anything, search the skills MCP and read any relevant guides."
This is just... rebranding for instructions and files? lol. Love how instructions for creating a skill is buried. Marketing go brr.
From the Anthropic Engineering blog.
I think Skills will be useful in helping regular AI users and non-technical people fall into better patterns.
Many power users of AI were already doing the things it encourages.