alt Hacker NewsI use claude code every day, and havent had a chance to dig super deep into skills, but even though ive read a lot of people describe them and say they're the best thing so far, I still dont get them. Theyre things the agent chooses to call right? They have different permissions? is it a tool call with different permissions and more context? I have yet to see a single post give an actual real-world concrete example of how theyre supposed to be used or a compare and contrast with other approaches.
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Maybe these might be handy: - https://github.com/anthropics/skills - https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/equipping-agents-for-t...
I think if it literally as a collection of .md files and scripts to help perform some set of actions. I'm excited for it not really as a "new thing" (as mentioned in the post) but as effectively an endorsement for this pattern of agent-data interaction.
apparently I missed Simon Willison's article, this at least somewhat explains them: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/claude-skills/
So if youre building your own agent, this would be a directory of markdown documents with headers that you tell the agent to scan so that its aware of them, and then if it thinks they could be useful it can choose to read all the instructions into its context? Is it any more than that?
I guess I dont understand how this isnt just RAG with an index you make the agent aware of?
The prerequisite thought here is that you're using CC to invoke CLI tools.
So now you need to get CC to understand _how_ to do that for various tools in a way that's context efficient, because otherwise you're relying on either potentially outdated knowledge that Claude has built in (leading to errors b/c CC doesn't know about recent versions) or chucking the entirety of a man page into your default context (inefficent).
What the Skill files do is then separate the when from the how.
Consider the git cli.
The skill file has a couple of sentences on when to use the git cli and then a much longer section on how it's supposed to be used, and the "how" section isn't loaded until you actually need it.
I've got skills for stuff like invoking the native screenshot CLI tool on the Mac, for calling a custom shell script that uses the github API to download and pull in screenshots from issues (b/c the cli doesn't know how to do this), for accessing separate APIs for data, etc.