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ithkuillast Saturday at 10:32 AM1 replyview on HN

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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simonwlast Saturday at 1:06 PM

There's a mechanism for that built into skills already: a skill folder can also include additional reference markdown files, and the skill can tell the coding agent to selectively read those extra files only when that information is needed on top of the skill.

There's an instruction about that in the Codex CLI skills prompt: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/13/openai-codex-cli/

  If SKILL.md points to extra folders such as references/, load only the specific files needed for the request; don't bulk-load everything.
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