Claude Skills (anthropic.com)

I wonder if Claude Skills will help return Claude back to the level of performance it had a few months ago.

Interesting. For Claude Code, this seems to have generous overlap with existing practice of having markdown "guides" listed for access in the CLAUDE.md. Maybe skills can simply make managing such guides more organized and declarative.

getting hard to keep up with skills, plugins, marketplaces, connectors, add-ons, yada yada

It is a bit ironic that the better the models get they seem to need more and more user input.

It superficially reminds me of the old "Alexa Skills" thing (I'm not even sure if Alexa still has "Skills"). It might just be the name making that connection for me.

If I understand correctly, looks like `skill` is a instructed usage / pattern of tools, so it saves llm agent's efforts at trial & error of using tools? and it basically just a prompt.

I love how the promise of free labor motivates everyone to become API first, document their practices, and plan ahead in writing before coding.

At first I wasn't sure what this is. Upon further inspection skills are effectively a bunch of markdown files and scripts that get unzipped at the right time and used as context. The scripts are executed to get deterministic output.

The idea is interesting and something I shall consider for our platform as well.

Seems like a more organized way to do the equivalent of a folder full of md files + instructing the LLM to ls that folder and read the ones it needs

Detailed engineering blog:

"Equipping agents for the real world with Agent Skills" https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/equipping-agents-for-t...

I think this is great. A problem with huge codebases is that CLAUDE.md files become bloated with niche workflows like CI and E2E testing. Combined with MCPs, this pollutes the context window and eventually degrades performance.

You get the best of both worlds if you can select tokens by problem rather than by folder.

The key question is how effective this will be with tool calling.

Seems like the exact same thing, from front page a few days ago: https://github.com/obra/superpowers/tree/main

I wonder how this works with mcpb (renamed from dxt Desktop extensions): https://github.com/anthropics/mcpb

Specifically, it looks like skills are a different structure than mcp, but overlap in what they provide? Skills seem to be just markdown file & then scripts (instead of prompts & tool calls defined in MCP?).

Question I have is why would I use one over the other?

Can someone explain the differences between this and Agents in Claude Code? Logically they seem similar. From my perspective it seems like Skills are more well-defined in their behavior and function?

The uptake on Claude-skills seems to have a lot of momentum already! I was fascinated on Tuesday by “Superpowers” , https://blog.fsck.com/2025/10/09/superpowers/ … and then packaged up all the tool-building I’ve been working on for awhile into somewhat tidy skills that i can delegate agents to:

http://github.com/ryancnelson/deli-gator I’d love any feedback

I'm perplexed why they would use such a silly example in their demo video (rotating an image of a dog upside down and cropping). Surely they can find more compelling examples of where these skills could be used?

"Skills are repeatable and customizable instructions that Claude can follow in any chat."

We used to call that a programming language. Here, they are presumably repeatable instructions how to generate stolen code or stolen procedures so users have to think even less or not at all.

"Keep in mind, this feature gives Claude access to execute code. While powerful, it means being mindful about which skills you use—stick to trusted sources to keep your data safe."

Yes, this can only end well.

I feel like this is making things more complicated than it needs to be. LLMs should automatically do this behind you, you won’t even see it.

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.

All of these random features is just pushing me further towards model agnostic tools like goose

I wonder what the accuracy is for Claude to always follow a Skill accurately. I've had trouble getting LLMs to follow specific workflows 100% consistently without skipping or missing steps.

Subagents, plugins, skills, hooks, mcp servers, output styles, memory, extended thinking... seems like a bunch of stuff you can configure in Claude Code that overlap in a lot of areas. Wish they could figure out a way to simplify things.

> Developers can also easily create, view, and upgrade skill versions through the Claude Console.

For coding in particular, it would be super-nice if they could just live in a standard location in the repo.

Basically just rules/workflows from cursor/windsurf, but with a UI.