It's more than a single prompt, but less than an entire agent. I find skills to be the tools you use on the fly. Like how I might have a wrench,screw-driver, hammer in my tool box.
tools vs skills is all about context efficiency from what I see. and yes, this isn't novel of claude. but they are the first to offer this abstraction.
Ideally I would build a bunch of atomic skills that combine well and claude just uses them naturally when the situation arises.
At some point I plan to do some ralph wiggum loop stuff maybe to hash out the best way for triggers to work.
Here's some prior work that might be interesting: https://scottspence.com/posts/how-to-make-claude-code-skills...
Edit: I realise it might look kind of weird I posted this link in 2 comments on this thread - disclaimer I am not the author of that random blog post, just sharing what I found!
During testing today I asked a task I knew should have activated a skill and claude just did it without the skill instead.
This might help: https://scottspence.com/posts/how-to-make-claude-code-skills...
That's it
(I've rephrased the sentence by removing "just" -- the novel thought here is that the agent's use of a skill can automatically trigger another skill, which is somewhat emergent.)
E.g. you could have:
- a set of skills to use design patterns of a library
- a skill to add to this skill-set -- either when prompted by user or autonomously via a stop-hook
E.g. I set up this combination for design patterns for the Langroid[1] LLM-Agent framework:
https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools/tree/main/pl...
That's what I have been doing as I'm building these skills out. There is a really fun testing/tdd loop that runs these skills through multiple prompts with baselines and tests it all out.
I was really curious to read it given the comments + full disclosure my co-founder recently wrote about a similar topic ("To Tool or Not to Tool") https://blog.codeyam.com/p/to-tool-or-not-to-tool .
I wanted to see how this is similar or different with the focus on Claude Code + Skills in a more literal sense vs. tools in a more abstract sense.
(year fixed below)
