Comment by esalman

Interesting responses here. I think most are missing the point.

For me, the main lesson here is seeing and learning from how others are using skills. Yesterday I was watching a Matt Pocock class on using agents and he was also showing off skills, such as how he uses a "grill-me" skill to develop product requirement document. I am certainly not going to do exactly what he does, but I now have my own ideas about how to develop requirements and implement them.

After all, in the word of Anthropic engineers themselves, Claude is like a talented engineer, but lacks expertise. Skills are folders and files that build expertise. Another important thing I leaned from Pocock is that the longer the context (or token size), the dumber the responses tend to get. So skills are another way to present the problem to an LLM in a compact manner and get optimized response.

Claude also has behavioral traits. So if someone iteratively builds a skill, it is most likely not going to port well to another user, because each of us chat differently. This is why I hesitate to share my skill folder with my colleagues. But I will certainly demo what I built so that they can see what's possible and figure out their own workflows.

So the value is in seeing how someone else builds using Claude, and imitate in your own way. Very much like when I first learned programming, I was copying code form Kernighan and Richie's C book, but then changing up things to understand how it works and later customize the code for my purpose.

I mentioned behavioral traits for another reason- the author is a psychologist and it is really interesting to see how she interacts with Claude, which is probably very different from how programmers use Claude. Tangentially, she (and a host of other experts in the field) left Twitter long time ago. I'm going to install bsky/mastodon and follow them, because I think it's important to watch how expert non-programmers are using LLMs.