This is just... rebranding for instructions and files? lol. Love how instructions for creating a skill is buried. Marketing go brr.
What’s next, capabilities? Talents? Hypothalamus.md?
Claude Skills
311–320 of 443 posts
Re: Claude Skills
#312Architectural 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.
This is just a formalization of an existing pattern many people were already using. 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…
If by "works well already" you mean "inconsistent prompt hacks that you have to constantly reinforce" then sure.
CLAUDE.md holds about as much weight has the "Classroom Rules" craft posters hanging in most kindergarten classrooms.
Re: Claude Skills
#313It says 3 minutes read there but only YouTube videos are 2 minutes :(
Re: Claude Skills
#314I 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 can just ask an LLM to set it up for you. Slop in, slop out.
Re: Claude Skills
#315I 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:…
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Re: Claude Skills
#316Earlier 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.
When you know the context is a one-and-done. Caching costs more than just running the prompt, but less than running the prompt twice.
Re: Claude Skills
#317[deleted]
Re: Claude Skills
#318Earlier 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.
Let’s not overstate what the technology actually is. LLMs amount to random token generators that try their best to have their outputs “rhyme” with their prompts, instructions, skills, or what humans know as goals and consequences.
It does a lot more than that.
Re: Claude Skills
#319I 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.
IMO this is a context window issue. Humans are pretty good are memorizing super broad context without great accuracy. Sometimes our "recall" function doesn't even work right ("How do you say 'blah' in German again?"), so the more you specialize (say, 10k hours / mastery), the better you are at recalling a specific set of "skills", but perhaps not other skills. On the other hand, LLMs have a programatic context with c…
Worth noting, even though it isn’t critical to your argument, that LLMs do not have perfect recall. I got to great lengths to keep agentic tools from relying on memory, because they often get it subtly wrong.
Re: Claude Skills
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
No, subagents are non interactive.