I'm a bit unclear what's different here from how vibe coders already work?

Pretty early on folks recognized that most MCPs can just be CLI commands, and a markdown file is fine for describing them. So Claude Code users have markdown files of CLI calls and mini tutorials on how to do things. The 'how to do things' part seems to be what we're now calling skills... Which we're still writing in markdown and using from Claude.

Is the new thing that Claude will match & add them to your context automatically vs you call them manually? And that's a breakthrough because there's some emergent behavior?

▲

simonw a day ago | parent [-]

I think skills are mainly just a formalization of the markdown plus CLI patterns that people have been using already.

The only material difference with skills is that Claude knows to scan them for YAML descriptions on startup, which means it can trigger them by itself more easily.

	▲	lmeyerov a day ago \| parent [-]
		Right, the 'knowing' is where I think the interesting thing is today for their evolution more mature claude.md files already typically index into other files, including guidance which to preload vs lazy load. However, in practice, claude forgets quite easily, so that pattern is janky in practice. A structured mechanism helps claude guarantee less forgetting. Forward looking, from an automation perspective of autonomous learning, this also makes it more accessible to talk about GEPA-for-everyone to maintain & generate these. We've been playing with similar flows in louie.ai, and came to a similar "just make it folders full of markdown with some learning automation options." I was guessing that was what was going on here, but the writeup felt like maybe more was being said :) (And thank you for continuing to write!)