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jrecyclebinlast Saturday at 5:48 AM2 repliesview on HN

Skill descriptions get dumped in your system prompt - just like MCP tool definitions and agent descriptions before them. The more you have, the more the LLM will be unable to focus on any one piece of it. You don't want a bunch of irrelevant junk in there every time you prompt it.

Skills are nice because they offload all the detailed prompts to files that the LLM can ask for. It's getting even better with Anthropic's recent switchboard operator (tool search tool) that doesn't clutter the system prompt but tries to cut the tool list down to those the LLM will need.


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ithkuillast Saturday at 10:32 AM

Can I organize skills hierarchically? If when many skills are defined, Claude Code loads all definitions into the prompt, potentially diluting its ability to identify relevant skills, I'd like a system where only broad skill group summaries load initially, with detailed descriptions loaded on-demand when Claude detects a matching skill group might be useful.

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greymaliklast Saturday at 1:43 PM

> Anthropic's recent switchboard operator

I don’t know what this is and Google isn’t finding anything. Can you clarify?

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