It's baffling to me. I was already making API calls and embedding context and various instructions precisely using backticks with "md". Is this really all this is? What am I missing? I don't even understand how this "feature" merits a press release from Anthropic, let alone a blog post extolling it.

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simonw a day ago | parent | next [-]

A few things:

1. By giving this name a pattern, people can have higher level conversations about it.

2. There is a small amount of new software here. Claude Code and https://claude.ai/ both now scan their skills/ folders on startup and extract a short piece of metadata about each skill from the YAML at the top of those markdown files. They then know that if the user e.g. says they want to create a PDF they should "cat skills/pdf/skill.md" first before proceeding with the task.

3. This is a new standard for distributing skills, which are sometimes just a markdown file but can also be a folder with a markdown file and one or more additional scripts or reference documents. The example skills here should help illustrate that: https://github.com/anthropics/skills/tree/main/document-skil... and https://github.com/anthropics/skills/tree/main/artifacts-bui...

I think the pattern itself is really neat, because it's an acknowledgement that a great way to give an LLM system additional "skills" is to describe them in a markdown file packaged alongside some relevant scripts.

It's also pleasantly vendor-neutral: other tools like Codex CLI can use these skills already (just tell them to go read skills/pdfs/skill.md and follow those instructions) and I expect they may well add formal support in the future, if this takes off as I expect it will.

	▲	ajtejankar a day ago \| parent [-]
		I have been independently thinking about a lot of this for some time now. So this is so exciting for me. Concretizing _skills_ allows, as you said, a common pattern for people to rally around. Like you, I have been going dizzy about its possibilities, specially when you realize that a single agent can be modified with skills from all its users. Imagine an app with just enough backbone to support any kind of skill. From here, different groups of users can collaborate and share skills with each other to customize it exactly to their specific niche skills. You could design Reddit like community moderation techniques to decide which skills get accepted into the common repo, which ones to prioritize, how to filter the duplicates, etc.

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causal a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I was puzzled by the announcement and remain puzzled after this blog post. I thought everyone knew you could keep use case specific context files handy.

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cma a day ago | parent | prev [-]

If also seems to be the same thing as subagents, but without clearing context, right?