Comment by OtherShrezzing
11 hours ago
I use Claude pretty extensively on a 2.5m loc codebase, and it's pretty decent at just reading the relevant readme docs & docstrings to figure out what's what. Those docs were written for human audiences years (sometimes decades) ago.
I'm very curious to know the size & state of a codebase where skills are beneficial over just having good information hierarchy for your documentation.
Claude can always self discover its own context. The question becomes whether it's way more efficient to have it grepping and lsing and whatever else it needs to do randomly poking around to build a half-baked context, or whether having a tailor made context injection that is dynamic can speed that up.
In other words, if you run an identical prompt, one with skill and one without, on a test task that requires discovering deeply how your codebase works, which one performs better on the following metrics, and how much better?
1. Accuracy / completion of the task
2. Wall clock time to execute the task
3. Token consumption of the task
Skills are more than code documentation. They can apply to anything that the model has to do, outside of coding.