its not though if you're working in a massive codebase or on a distributed system that has many interconnected parts.

skills that teach the agent how to pipe data, build requests, trace them through a system and datasources, then update code based on those results are a step function improvement in development.

ai has fundamentally changed how productive i am working on a 10m line codebase, and i'd guess less than 5% of that is due to code gen thats intended to go to prod. Nearly all of it is the ability to rapidly build tools and toolchains to test and verify what i'm doing.

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sillysaurusx 3 hours ago | parent [-]

But... plain Claude does that. At least for my codebase, which is nowhere close to your 10m line. But we do processing on lots of data (~100TB) and Claude definitely builds one-off tools and scripts to analyze it, which works pretty great in my experience.

What sort of skills are you referring to?

	▲	FINDarkside an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think people are looking at skills the wrong way. It's not like it gives it some kind of superpowers it couldn't do otherwise. Ideally you'll have Claude write the skills anyway. It's just a shortcut so you don't have to keep rewriting a prompt all over again and/or have Claude keep figuring out how to do the same thing repeatedly. You can save lots of time, tokens and manual guidance by having well thought skills. Some people use these to "larp" some kind of different job roles etc and I don't think that's productive use of skills unless the prompts are truly exceptional.
	▲	jmalicki 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If you build up and save some of those scripts, skills help Claude remember how and when to use them. Skills are crazy useful to tell Claude how to debug your particular project, especially when you have a library of useful scripts for doing so.