12 ms·
Skills for organizations, partners, the ecosystem
- albingroen 9mo agoThey really do love standards
- Seattle3503 9mo agoMy company has a plugin marketplace in a git repo where we host our shared skills. It would be nice if we could plug that into the web interface.
- verdverm 9mo agoOr if we wrote these things in a language with real imports and modules? I'm authoring equivalent in CUE, and assimilating "standard" provider ones into CUE on the fly so my agent can work with all the shenanigans out there.
- quacky_batak 9mo agoi like how Anthropic has positioned themselves as the true AI research company and donating “standards” like that. Although Skills are just md files but it’s good to see them “donate” it. There goal seems to be simple: Focus on coding and improving it. They’ve found a great niche and hopefully revenue generating business there. OpenAI on the other hand doesn’t give me same vibes, they don’t seem very oriented. They’re playing catchup with both Google models and Anthropic
- plufz 9mo agoI have no idea why I’m about to defend OpenAI here. BUT OpenAI have released some open weight models like gpt-oss and whisper. But sure open weight not open source. And yeah I really don’t like OpenAI as a company to be clear.
- dismantlethesun 9mo agoThey have but it does feel like they are developing a closed platform aka Apple. Apple has shortcuts, but they haven’t propped it up like a standard that other people can use. To contrast this is something you can use even if you have nothing to do with Claude, and your tools created will be compatible with the wider ecosystem.
- theshrike79 9mo agoA skill can also contain runnable code. Many many MCPs could and should just be a skill instead.
- alexgotoi 9mo ago[flagged]
- reedf1 9mo agoHow likely are we to look back on Agent/MCP/Skills as some early Netscape peculiarity? I would dive into adoption if I didn't think some new thing would beat the paradigm in a fortnight.
- xnx 9mo agoDon't forget A2A: https://developers.googleblog.com/en/a2a-a-new-era-of-agent-interoperability/ https://developers.googleblog.com/en/a2a-a-new-era-of-agent-... We'll see how many of these are around in a few years.
- DenisM 9mo agoWhy do you think they will fade out?
- orliesaurus 9mo agoAdoption on most of these has been weak, except MCP (and whatever flavor of markdown file you like to add to your agent context)
- zingababba 9mo agoMicrosoft seems to be pushing MCP pretty hard in the Azure ecosystem. My cynical take is they are very aware of the context bloat so see it as extra inference $$.
- gaigalas 9mo agoFinally I can share this beauty with a wider world: https://github.com/alganet/skills/blob/main/skills/left-padding/SKILL.md https://github.com/alganet/skills/blob/main/skills/left-padd...
- josteink 9mo agoIs that intentionally designed to completely occupy the full context window of the earlier GPT models? Either way, that’s hilarious. Well done.
- gaigalas 9mo agoI asked a model to write for me following the style and tone of other skills! <conspiracy_mode> maybe all of them were designed to occupy the full context window of earlier GPT models </conspiracy_mode>
- xd1936 9mo agoThis is hilarious
- debugnik 9mo agoAmazing. It's just missing an order for the chatbot to say "I know left-pad" before actually doing any work.
- asadm 9mo agoGood riddance MCP.
- observationist 9mo agoThat's not what this is. MCP is still around and useful- skills are tailored prompt frameworks for specific tasks or contexts. They're useful for specialization, and in conjunction with post-training after some good data is acquired, will allow the next generation of models to be a lot better at whatever jobs produce good data for training.
- asadm 9mo agoI have seen ~10 IQ points drop with each MCP I added. I have replaced them all with either skill-like instructions or curl calls in AGENTS.md with much better "tool-calling" rate.
- verdverm 9mo agoThat's a context pollution problem, not an MCP problem. https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/advanced-tool-use https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/advanced-tool-use
- asadm 9mo agobuilding a rag for searching correct MCP is a band-aid.
- verdverm 9mo ago1. it's not just about MCP, if you have 100s of skills, you are going to have the same context issues 2. it was delegation to a subagent to select the tools that should be made available, which sounded like it got the whole list and did "rag" on the fly like any model would You're going to want to provide your agent with search, rag, subagent context gathering (and pruning/compation/mgmt) that can work across the internet, code bases, large tool/skill sets, past interaction history. All of this can be presented as a single or few tools to your main agent and is the more meta-pattern/trend emerging
- ada1981 9mo agoOur lab has been experimenting with “meta skills” that allow creation of skills to use later after a particular workflow. Paper & applications published here: https://earthpilot.ai/metaskills/ https://earthpilot.ai/metaskills/
- babyshake 9mo agoI have been experimenting with these same type of factory pattern skills. Thanks for sharing.
- danielbln 9mo agoAfter a session with Claude Code I just tell it "turn this into a skill, incorporate what we've learned in this session".
- uhgrippa 9mo agoI noticed a similar optimization path with skills, where I now have subagents to analyze the performance of a previous skill/command/hook execution, triggered by a command. I've pushed this to my plugin marketplace https://github.com/athola/claude-night-market https://github.com/athola/claude-night-market
- an0malous 9mo agoI feel inspired and would like to donate my standard for Agent Personas to the community. A persona can be defined by a markdown file with the following frontmatter: --- persona: hacker description: logical, talks about computers a lot, enjoys coffee, somewhat snarky and arrogant --- <more details here>
- brap 9mo agoGive this man a Turing Award
- allisdust 9mo agoPlease consider donating this to the Linux Foundation so they can drive this inspiring innovation forward.
- acedTrex 9mo agoHave you considered publishing this with a few charts about vague levels of "correctness"?
- rvz 9mo agoWhat is "correctness?"... wait hang on let me think... "you're absolutely right!"
- oblio 9mo ago> logical Please tell us how REALLY feel about JavaScript.
- InitialLastName 9mo agoLuckily you get the "extremely confident, even when wrong" attribute for free.
- sshine 9mo agoBut always willing to admit the opposite is true and go with that on a whim.
- someguy101010 9mo agoIs it possible to provide a llm a skill through the mcp resource feature?
- theshrike79 9mo agoIt’s also possible to implement an MCP as a skill
- uhgrippa 9mo agoIn a way yes, you can reduce context usage by a non-negligible amount approaching it this way. I'm investigate this on my skill validation/analysis/bidirectional MCP server project and hope to have it as a released feature soon: https://github.com/athola/skrills https://github.com/athola/skrills
- makestuff 9mo agoIs a skill essentially a reusable prompt that is inserted at the start of any query? The marketing of Agents/MCP/skills/etc is very confusing to me.
- cshimmin 9mo agoIt's basically just a way for the LLM to lazy-load curated information, tools, and scripts into context. The benefit of making it a "standard" is that future generations of LLMs will be trained on this pattern specifically, and will get quite good at it.
- prodigycorp 9mo agoDoes it persist the loaded information for the remainder of the conversation or does it intelligently cull the context when it's not needed?
- brabel 9mo agoEach agent will do that differently, but Gemini CLI, for example, lets you save any session with a name so you can continue it later.
- terminalkeys 9mo agoClaude Code subagents keep their context windows separate from the main agent, sending back only the most relevant context based on the main agent's request.
- dcre 9mo agoThis question doesn’t have anything to do with skills per se, this is just about how different agents handle context. I think right now the main way they cull context is by culling noisy tool call output. Skills are basically saved prompts and shouldn’t be that long, so they would probably not be near the top of the list of things to cull.
- csomar 9mo ago> It's basically just a way for the LLM to lazy-load curated information, tools, and scripts into context. So basically a reusable prompt like the previous has asked?
- foobarqux 9mo agoWhat is the difference between 3rd party skills and connectors? How do you access/install 3rd party skills in claude code?
- mrbonner 9mo agoThe agentic development scene has slowly turned into a full-blown JavaScript circus—bright lights, loud chatter, and endless acts that all look suspiciously familiar. We keep wrapping the same old problems in shiny new packages, parading them around as if they’re groundbreaking innovations. How long before the crowd grows tired of yet another round of “RFC” performances?
- rvz 9mo agoWell, these agentic / AI companies don't even know what an RFC is, let alone how to write one. The last time they attempted to create a "standard" (MCP) it was not only premature, but it was a complete security mess. Apart from Google Inc., I have not seen a single "AI company" propose an RFC that was reviewed by the IETF and became a proper internet standard. [0] "MCP" was one of the worst so-called "standards" ever built since the JWT was proposed. So I do not take Anthropic seriously when they create so-called "open standards" especially when the reference implementation is in Javascript or TypeScript. [0] https://www.rfc-editor.org/standards https://www.rfc-editor.org/standards
- lxgr 9mo agoTo be fair, security wasn’t even a consideration until RFCs were well into triple digits. We’re still very early, as they say. > I have not seen a single "AI company" propose an RFC that was reviewed by the IETF and became a proper internet standard. Why would the IETF have anything to do with LLM/agent standards? This seems like a category error. They also don’t ratify web standards, for example.
- verdverm 9mo agoIETF maintains the HTTP standard https://httpwg.org/ https://httpwg.org/ IETF is involved in protocol standards, MCP/A2A are certainly in this category, skills less so
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
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- vladsh 9mo agoSkills are a pretty awkward abstraction. They emerged to patch a real problem, generic models require fine-tuning via context, which quickly leads to bloated context files and context dilution (ie more hallucinations) But skills dont really solve the problem. Turning that workaround into a standard feels strange. Standardizing a patch isn’t something I’d expect from Anthropic, it’s unclear what is their endgame here
- wuliwong 9mo ago>But skills dont really solve the problem. I think that they often do solve the problem, just maybe they have some other side effects/trade offs.
- theshrike79 9mo agoThey’re not a perfect solution, but they are a good one. The best one we have thought of so far.
- brabel 9mo agoHow would you solve the same problem? Skills seem to be just a pattern (before this spec) that lets the LLMs choose what information they need to "load". It's not that different from a person looking up the literature before they do a certain job, rather than just reading every book every time in case it comes in handy one day. Whatever you do you will end up with the same kind of solution, there's no way to just add all useful context to the LLM beforehand.
- root_axis 9mo ago> it’s unclear what is their endgame here Marketing. That defines pretty much everything Anthropic does beyond frontier model training. They're the same people producing sensationalized research headlines about LLMs trying to blackmail folks in order to prevent being deleted.
- ako 9mo agoSkills don’t solve the problem if you think an llm should know everything. But if you see LLMs mostly as a text plan-do-check-act machine that can process input text, generate output text, and can create plans how to create more knowledge and validate the output, without knowing everything upfront, skills are perfectly fine solution. The value of standardizing skills is that the skills you define work with any agentic tool. Doesn't matter how simple they are, if they dont work easily, they have no use. You need a practical and efficient way to give the llm your context. Just like every organization has its own standards, best practices, architectures that should be documented, as new developers do not know this upfront, LLMs also need your context. An llm is not an all knowing brain, but it’s a plan-do-check-act text processing machine.
- almosthere 9mo agohow are skills and mcp different?
- langitbiru 9mo agoSkills are local. MCP can be remote and has authentication.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- almosthere 9mo agoIt still sounds the same to me.
- esafak 9mo agoSkills are supposed to be lighter (on your context).
- runtimepanic 9mo agoInteresting move. One thing I’m curious about is how opinionated the standard is supposed to be. In practice, agent “skills” tend to blur the line between capabilities, tools, and workflows, especially once statefulness and retries enter the picture. Is the goal here mostly interoperability between agent frameworks, or do you see this evolving into something closer to a contract for agent behavior over time? I can imagine standardization helping a lot, but only if it stays flexible enough to avoid freezing today’s agent design assumptions.
- exasperaited 9mo agoArgh word creep. It has been published as an open specification. Whether it is a standard isn't for them to declare.
- layer8 9mo agoThey published a specification, that doesn’t yet make it a standard.
- robertheadley 9mo agoI had developed a tool for Roo Code, and have moved over to anti-gravity with no problem, that basically gives playwright the ability to develop and test user scripts in an automated fashion. It is functionally a skill. I suppose once anti-gravity supports skills, I will make it one officially.
- unbelievably 9mo agoWhy does this need to be a standard in the first place. This isn't DDR5 lol, it's literally just politely asking the model to remember some short descriptions and read a corresponding file when it thinks appropriate. I feel like these abstractions are supposed to make Claude sound more sophisticated because WOW now we can give the guy new skills! But really they're just obfuscating the "data as code" aspect of LLMs which is their true power (and vulnerability ofc).
- good-idea 9mo agoI have been switching between OpenCode and Claude - one thing I like about OpenCode is the ability to define custom agents. These can be ones tailored to specific workflows like PR reviews or writing change logs. I haven't yet attempted the equivalent of this with skills in Claude. These two solutions look feel and smell like the same thing. Are they the same thing? Any OpenCode users out there have any hot or nuanced takes?
- abatilo 9mo agoClaude code simply supports agents also
- terminalkeys 9mo agoClaude Code has subagents as well. I created a workflow with multiple agents to build iOS apps, including agents for orchestration, design, build, and QA.
- 0x008 9mo agoThe skills can be specific to a repository but the agents are global, right?
- apf6 9mo agoIt was just a few months ago that the MCP spec added a concept called "prompts" which are really similar to skills. And of course Claude Code has custom slash commands which are also very similar. Getting a lot of whiplash from all these specifications that are hastily put together and then quickly forgotten.
- verdverm 9mo agoIt's a "standard" though! /s
- vedmakk 9mo agoMy understanding is, that MCP Prompts and Slash Commands are "user triggered" whereas Skills (and MCP Tools) are "model triggered". Other than that it appears MCP prompts end up as slash commands provided by an MCP Server (instead of client side command definitions). But the actual knowledge that is encoded in skills/commands/mcp prompts is very similar.
- seg_lol 9mo agoWhat I like is that there are 20 different names for things that are basically glorified checklists and paragraphs.
- htrp 9mo agoI wish agentic skills were something other than a system prompt or a series of step-by-step instructions. feels like anthropicide and opportunity here to do something truly groundbreaking but ended up with prompt engineering.
- mkagenius 9mo agoIf anyone wants to use Skills in Gemini CLI or any other llm tool - check out something I have created, open-skills https://github.com/BandarLabs/open-skills https://github.com/BandarLabs/open-skills It does code execution in an apple container if your Skill requires any code execution. It also proves the point that Skills are basically repackaged MCPs (if you look into my code).
- theturtletalks 9mo agoWill Skills and Code Execution replace MCPs eventually?
- mkagenius 9mo agoI doubt that. MCPs are broader. You can serve a Skill via a MCP but the reverse may not be always true. For example, you can't have a directory named "Stripe-Skills" which will give you a breakdown of last week's revenue (unless you write in the skills how to connect to stripe and get that information). So, most of the remote, existing services are better used as MCPs (essentially APIs).
- terminalkeys 9mo agoAll the talk about "open" standards from AI companies feels like VC-backed public LLM experiments. Even if these standards fade, they help researchers create and validate new tools. I see this especially with local models. The rise of CLI-based LLM coding tools lets me use models like GPT OSS 20B to build apps locally and offline.
- liampulles 9mo agoI'm curious about the `license` field in the specification: https://agentskills.io/specification https://agentskills.io/specification. Could one make a copyleft type license such that the generated code must be licensed free and open and under the same license? How enforceable are licenses on these skills anyway, if one can take in the whole skill with an agent and generate a legally distinct but functionally close variant?
- pplonski86 9mo agoIs codex working well with python notebooks?
- jameslk 9mo ago“Agent skills” seems more like a pattern than something that needs a standard. It’s like announcing you’ve created a standard for “singletons” or “monads”
- delayedrelease 9mo agoTired of having to learn the Next New Thing (tm) that'll be replaced in a month.
- kristo 9mo agoStill can’t symlink skills from Claude code to codex tho :/
- ath3nd 9mo ago[dead]
- irrationalfab 9mo agoThere's a pattern I keep seeing: LLMs used to replace things we already know how to do deterministically. Parsing a known HTML structure, transforming a table, running a financial simulation. It works, but it's like using a helicopter to cross the street: expensive, slow, and not guaranteed to land exactly where you intended. The real opportunity with Agent Skills isn't just packaging prompts. It's providing a mechanism that enables a clean split: LLM as the control plane (planning, choosing tools, handling ambiguous steps) and code or sub-agents as the data/execution plane (fetching, parsing, transforming, simulating, or executing NL steps in a separate context). This requires well-defined input/output contracts and a composition model. I opened a discussion on whether Agent Skills should support this kind of composability: https://github.com/agentskills/agentskills/issues/11 https://github.com/agentskills/agentskills/issues/11
- ugh123 9mo ago100% Additionally, I can't even get claude or codex to reliable use the prompt and simple rules (use this command to compile) in an agents.md or whatever required markdown file is needed. Why would I assume they will reliably handle skills prompts spread about a codebase? I've even seen tool usage deteriorate while it's thinking and self commanding through its output to say.. read code from a file. Sometimes it uses tail while other times it gets confused on the output and then writes a basic python program to parse lines and strings from the same file to effectively get what was the same output as before. How bizarre!
- basch 9mo agoThe same applies to context vs a database. If a reasoning model makes a decision about something, it should be put off to the side and stored as a value/variable/entry somewhere. Instead of using pages and pages of context, it makes sense for some tasks to "press" decisions that become more permanent to the conversation. You can somewhat accomplish that with notebooklm, by turning results into notes into sources, but notebooklm is insular and doesnt have the research and imaging features of gemini. And also, in writing, writing from top to bottom has its disadvantages. It makes sense to emulate human writing process and have passes, as you flesh out, and conversely summarize writing. Current LLMs can brute force these things through emulation/observation/mimicry but they arent as good as doing it the right way. Not only would I like to see "skills" but also "processes" where you create a well defined order that tasks are accomplished in sequence. Repeatable templates. This would essentially include variables in the templates, set for replacement.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- skillcreator 9mo agoLove seeing this become an open standard. We just shipped the first universal skill installer built on it: npx ai-agent-skills install frontend-design 20 of the most starred Claude skills ever, now open across Claude Code, Cursor, Amp, VS Cod : anywhere that supports the spec. Would love some feedback on it github.com/skillcreatorai/Ai-Agent-Skills
- user3939382 9mo agoThis is the right direction but this implementation is playdough and this needs to be a stone mansion. I’m working on a non-LLM AI model that will blow this out of the water.
- fudged71 9mo agoI'd love to see way more interest, rigor, tooling, etc in the industry regarding Skills, I really think they have solved the biggest problems that killed Expert Systems back in the day. I'd love to see the same enthusiasm as MCPs for these, I think in the long term they will be much more important than MCPs (still complementary).
- itissid 9mo agoOne thing that is interesting to think about is given a skill which is just "pre-context", how can it be _evolved_ to create prompts given _my_ context? e.g. here is their web artifact skill builder from desktop app: ``` web-artifacts-builder Suite of tools for creating elaborate, multi-component claude.ai HTML artifacts using modern frontend web technologies (React, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui). Use for complex artifacts requiring state management, routing, or shadcn/ui components - not for simple single-file HTML/JSX artifacts. ``` Say I want to build a landing page with some relatively static content — I don't know it yet but its just gonna be bootstrap CSS, no SPA/React(ish), it'll be fine with templated server side thing. But I don't know how to express this in words. Could the skill _evolve_ based on what my preferences are and what is possible for a relative novice to grok and construct? This is a simple example, but it could extend to say using sqlite+litestream instead of postgres or using Gradient boosted trees instead of an expensive transformer based classifier.
- veunes 9mo agoIf skills really can move across platforms, that's a meaningful push against lock-in, at least in theory
- officialchicken 9mo agoXML Config? Can someone explain that decision?