The instructions are standard documents - but this is not all. What the system adds is an index of all skills, built from their descriptions, that is passed to the llm in each conversation. The idea is to let the llm read the skill when it is needed and not load it into context upfront. Humans use indexes too - but not in this way. But there are some analogies with GUIs and how they enhance discoverability of features for humans.

I wish they arranged it around READMEs. I have a directory with my tasks and I have a README.md there - before codex had skills it already understood that it needs to read the readme when it was dealing with tasks. The skills system is less directory dependent so is a bit more universal - but I am not sure if this is really needed.

Claude reads from .claude/instructions.md whenever you make a new convo as a default thing. I usually have Claude add things like project layout info and summaries, preferred tooling to use, etc. So there's a reasonable expectation of how it should run. If it starts 'forgetting' I tell it to re-read it.

> What the system adds is an index of all skills, built from their descriptions, that is passed to the llm in each conversation. The idea is to let the llm read the skill when it is needed and not load it into context upfront.

This is different from swagger / OpenAPI how?

I get cross trained web front-end devs set a new low bar for professional amnesia and not-invented-here-ism, but maybe we could not do that yet another time?

Humans use indexes too - but not in this way.

What's different?