Comment by troupo
21 hours ago
> You can generally tell which ones are actually doing something if they are using skills, with programs in them.
> Otherwise, you're just feeding in different prompts and steps
"skills" are literally just .md files with different prompts and steps.
> That's actually adding something claude code doesn't have, instead of just saying "You are an expert in blah"
It's not adding anything but a prompt saying "when asked to do X invoke script Y or do steps Z"
Skill are md files, but they are not just that. They are also scripts. That's what adding things are. You can make a skill that is just a prompt, but that misses the point of the value.
You're packaging the tool with the skill, or multiple tools to do a single thing.
In the end it's still an .md file pointing to a script that ends being just a prompt for the agent that the agent may or may not pick up, may or may not discover, may or may not forget after context compaction etc.
There's no inherent magic to skills, or any fundamental difference between them and "just feeding in different prompts and steps". It literally is just feeding different prompt and steps.