Your skepticism is valid. Vercel ran a study where they said that skills underperform putting a docs index in AGENTS.md[0].

My guess is that the standardization is going to make its way into how the models are trained and Skills are eventually going to pull out ahead.

0: https://vercel.com/blog/agents-md-outperforms-skills-in-our-...

Agents add a docs index in context for skills, so this is an issue of finding that the current specific implementation of skills in Claude Code is suboptimal.

Their reasoning about it is also flawed. E.g. "No decision point. With AGENTS.md, there's no moment where the agent must decide "should I look this up?" The information is already present." - but this is exactly the case for skills too. The difference is just where in the context the information is, and how it is structured.

Having looked at their article, ironically I think the reason it works is that they likely force more information into context by giving the agent less information to work with:

Instead of having a description, which might convince the agent a given skill isn't relevant, their index is basically a list of vague filenames, forcing the agent to make a guess, and potentialy reading the wrong thing.

This is basically exactly what skills were added to avoid. But it will break if the description isn't precise enough. And it's perfectly possible that current tooling isn't aggressive enough about pruning detail that might tempt the agent to ignore relevant files.