I thought this was worth the quick read. Just as the article says at the start, I thought skills were essentially the same as pasting a long Markdown prompt document into the Claude Code window, or having Claude read the prompt file. But it seems if you invoke the skill, CC handles it quite differently, eg it's special cased for how it survives compaction.

Changed my mental model of using Skills a bit anyway.

I was stubbornly of the same mindset, but had friends and colleagues that raved about skills, i thought it was hype cycle context management - i'm happy to be proven wrong