Skills in CC have been a bit frustrating for me. They don't trigger reliably and the emphasis on "it's just markdown" makes it harder to have them reliably call certain tools with the correct arguments.
The idea that agent harnesses should primarily have their functionality dictated by plaintext commands feels like a copout around programming in some actually useful, semi-opinionated functionality (not to mention that it makes capability-discoverability basically impossible). For example, Claude Code has three modes: plan, ask about edits, and auto-accept edits. I always start with a plan and then I end up with multiple tasks. I'd like to auto-accept edits for a step at a time and the only way to do that reliably is to ask CC to do that, but it's not reliable—sometimes it just continues to go into the next step. If this were programmed explicitly into CC rather than relying on agent obedience, we could ditch the nondeterminism and just have a hook on task completion that toggles auto-complete back to "off."
The saving grace of Claude Code skills is that when writing them yourself, you can give them frontmatter like "use when mentioning X" that makes them become relevant for very specific "shibboleths" - which you can then use when prompting.
Are we at an ideal balance where Claude Code is pulling things in proactively enough... without bringing in irrelevant skills just because the "vibes" might match in frontmatter? Arguably not. But it's still a powerful system.
> idea that agent harnesses should primarily have their functionality dictated by plaintext commands feels like a copout
I think it's more along the lines of acknowledging the fast-paced changes in the field, and refusing to cast into code something that's likely to rapidly evolve in the near future.
Once things settle down into tested practices, we'll see more "permanent" instrumentation arise.
> sometimes it just continues to go into the next step
Use a structured workflow that loops on every task and includes a pause for user confirmation at the end. Enforce it with a hook. I'm not sure if you can toggle auto-accept this way, but I think the end result is what you're asking for.
I use this with great success, sometimes toggling auto-accept on when confidence is high that Claude can complete a step without guidance, and toggling off when confidence is low and you want to slow down and steer, with Claude stopping between the steps. Now that prompt suggestions are a thing, you can just hit enter to continue on the suggested prompt to continue.
Are you using either CLAUDE.md or .claude/INSTRUCTIONS.md to direct Claude about the different agents?
Also, be aware that when you add new instructions if you don't tell claude to reread these files, it will NOT have it in its context window until you tell it to read them OR you make a new CC session. This was a bit frustrating for me because it was not immediately obvious.
I think unless you're doing simple tasks, skills are unreliable. For better reliability, I have the agent trigger APIs that handles the complex logic (and its own LLM calls) internally. Has anyone found a solid strategy for making complex 'skills' more dependable?
In my experience, all text “instruction” to the agent should be taken on a prayer. If you write compact agent guidance that is not contradictory and is local and useful to your project, the agent will follow it most of the time. There is nothing that you can write that will force the agent to follow it all of the time.
If one can accept failure to follow instructions, then the world is open. That condition does not really comport with how we think about machines. Nevertheless, it is the case.
Right now, a productive split is to place things that you need to happen into tooling and harnessing, and place things that would be nice for the agent to conceptualize into skills.
I haven't done a lot with skills yet, but maybe try and leverage hooks to enforce skill usage, and move most of the skill's logic and complexity into a script so the agent only needs to reason about how to call the script.
My only strategy is what used to be called slash-commands but are also skills now, I.e I call them explicitly. I think that actually works quite well and you can allow specific tools and tell it to use specific hooks for security of validation in the frontmatter properties.
So far my experience with skills is that they slow down or confuse agents unless you as the user understand what the skill actually contains and how it works. In general I would rather install a CLI tool and explain to the agent how I want it used vs. trying to get the agent to use a folder of instructions that I don't really understand what's inside.
> So far my experience with skills is that they slow down or confuse agents unless you as the user understand what the skill actually contains and how it works. In general I would rather install a CLI tool and explain to the agent how I want it used vs. trying to get the agent to use a folder of instructions that I don't really understand what's inside.
For Claude Code I add the tooling into either CLAUDE.md or .claude/INSTRUCTIONS.md which Claude reads when you start a new instance. If you update it, you MUST ask Claude to reread the file so it knows the full instructions.
Most LLM "harnessing" seems very lazy and bolted on. You can build much more robustly by leveraging a more complex application layer where you can manage state, but I guess people struggle building that
I’ve had a great experience with CLI-related skills at work. We have written CLIs for systems like Jira, along with skills that document the CLIs and describe the organisation of Jira at our company. Claude Code loads these reliably whenever you mention Jira or an issue number.
Alternatively, I’ve had less luck with purely documentation skills. They seem to be loaded less reliably when they’re not linked to actions the agent wants to take, and it is frustrating to watch the agent try to figure something out when the docs are one skill load away.
Skills feel analogous to behavioral programs. If you give an agent access to a programmable substrate (e.g. bash + CLI tools), you write these Markdown programs which are triggered and read when the agent thinks certain behaviors will be beneficial.
It's a great idea: really neat take on programmability, and can be reloaded while the agent is running without tweaking the harness, etc -- lots of benefits.
`pi` has a great skills implementation too.
I think skills might really shine if you take a minimal approach to the system prompt (like `pi`) -- a lot of the times, if I want to orchestrate the agent in some complex behavior, I want to start fresh, and having it walk through a bunch of skills ... possibly the smaller the system prompt, the more likely the agent is to follow the skills without issue.
Yes -- skills live in a special gap between "should have been a deterministic program" and "model already had the ability to figure this out". My personal experience leaves me in agreement that minimal system prompts are definitely the way to go.
Skills in CC have been a bit frustrating for me. They don't trigger reliably and the emphasis on "it's just markdown" makes it harder to have them reliably call certain tools with the correct arguments.
The idea that agent harnesses should primarily have their functionality dictated by plaintext commands feels like a copout around programming in some actually useful, semi-opinionated functionality (not to mention that it makes capability-discoverability basically impossible). For example, Claude Code has three modes: plan, ask about edits, and auto-accept edits. I always start with a plan and then I end up with multiple tasks. I'd like to auto-accept edits for a step at a time and the only way to do that reliably is to ask CC to do that, but it's not reliable—sometimes it just continues to go into the next step. If this were programmed explicitly into CC rather than relying on agent obedience, we could ditch the nondeterminism and just have a hook on task completion that toggles auto-complete back to "off."
The saving grace of Claude Code skills is that when writing them yourself, you can give them frontmatter like "use when mentioning X" that makes them become relevant for very specific "shibboleths" - which you can then use when prompting.
Are we at an ideal balance where Claude Code is pulling things in proactively enough... without bringing in irrelevant skills just because the "vibes" might match in frontmatter? Arguably not. But it's still a powerful system.
> idea that agent harnesses should primarily have their functionality dictated by plaintext commands feels like a copout
I think it's more along the lines of acknowledging the fast-paced changes in the field, and refusing to cast into code something that's likely to rapidly evolve in the near future.
Once things settle down into tested practices, we'll see more "permanent" instrumentation arise.
Surely this logic doesn't apply if we're to believe that "code is cheap" now :p
You can publish scripts with skills you author, right? With carefully constructed markdown that should allow the agent to call tools the right way.
> sometimes it just continues to go into the next step
Use a structured workflow that loops on every task and includes a pause for user confirmation at the end. Enforce it with a hook. I'm not sure if you can toggle auto-accept this way, but I think the end result is what you're asking for.
I use this with great success, sometimes toggling auto-accept on when confidence is high that Claude can complete a step without guidance, and toggling off when confidence is low and you want to slow down and steer, with Claude stopping between the steps. Now that prompt suggestions are a thing, you can just hit enter to continue on the suggested prompt to continue.
Are you using either CLAUDE.md or .claude/INSTRUCTIONS.md to direct Claude about the different agents?
Also, be aware that when you add new instructions if you don't tell claude to reread these files, it will NOT have it in its context window until you tell it to read them OR you make a new CC session. This was a bit frustrating for me because it was not immediately obvious.
https://scottspence.com/posts/measuring-claude-code-skill-ac... works very well
I think unless you're doing simple tasks, skills are unreliable. For better reliability, I have the agent trigger APIs that handles the complex logic (and its own LLM calls) internally. Has anyone found a solid strategy for making complex 'skills' more dependable?
In my experience, all text “instruction” to the agent should be taken on a prayer. If you write compact agent guidance that is not contradictory and is local and useful to your project, the agent will follow it most of the time. There is nothing that you can write that will force the agent to follow it all of the time.
If one can accept failure to follow instructions, then the world is open. That condition does not really comport with how we think about machines. Nevertheless, it is the case.
Right now, a productive split is to place things that you need to happen into tooling and harnessing, and place things that would be nice for the agent to conceptualize into skills.
Is it that the skills aren't being triggered reliably, or that they get triggered but the skill itself is complex and doesn't work as expected?
both
I haven't done a lot with skills yet, but maybe try and leverage hooks to enforce skill usage, and move most of the skill's logic and complexity into a script so the agent only needs to reason about how to call the script.
My only strategy is what used to be called slash-commands but are also skills now, I.e I call them explicitly. I think that actually works quite well and you can allow specific tools and tell it to use specific hooks for security of validation in the frontmatter properties.
You can write skills that have an associated js/python/whatever script.
> Skills in CC have been a bit frustrating for me. They don't trigger reliably
Referencing them in AGENTS/CLAUDE.md has increased their usage for me.
So far my experience with skills is that they slow down or confuse agents unless you as the user understand what the skill actually contains and how it works. In general I would rather install a CLI tool and explain to the agent how I want it used vs. trying to get the agent to use a folder of instructions that I don't really understand what's inside.
> So far my experience with skills is that they slow down or confuse agents unless you as the user understand what the skill actually contains and how it works. In general I would rather install a CLI tool and explain to the agent how I want it used vs. trying to get the agent to use a folder of instructions that I don't really understand what's inside.
For Claude Code I add the tooling into either CLAUDE.md or .claude/INSTRUCTIONS.md which Claude reads when you start a new instance. If you update it, you MUST ask Claude to reread the file so it knows the full instructions.
Most LLM "harnessing" seems very lazy and bolted on. You can build much more robustly by leveraging a more complex application layer where you can manage state, but I guess people struggle building that
I mean, yes. You should do exactly that: instruct an agent on how to do something you understand in terms you can explain.
Putting that in a `.md` file just means you don’t need to do it twice.
I’ve had a great experience with CLI-related skills at work. We have written CLIs for systems like Jira, along with skills that document the CLIs and describe the organisation of Jira at our company. Claude Code loads these reliably whenever you mention Jira or an issue number.
Alternatively, I’ve had less luck with purely documentation skills. They seem to be loaded less reliably when they’re not linked to actions the agent wants to take, and it is frustrating to watch the agent try to figure something out when the docs are one skill load away.
Skills feel analogous to behavioral programs. If you give an agent access to a programmable substrate (e.g. bash + CLI tools), you write these Markdown programs which are triggered and read when the agent thinks certain behaviors will be beneficial.
It's a great idea: really neat take on programmability, and can be reloaded while the agent is running without tweaking the harness, etc -- lots of benefits.
`pi` has a great skills implementation too.
I think skills might really shine if you take a minimal approach to the system prompt (like `pi`) -- a lot of the times, if I want to orchestrate the agent in some complex behavior, I want to start fresh, and having it walk through a bunch of skills ... possibly the smaller the system prompt, the more likely the agent is to follow the skills without issue.
Yes -- skills live in a special gap between "should have been a deterministic program" and "model already had the ability to figure this out". My personal experience leaves me in agreement that minimal system prompts are definitely the way to go.
I really dont get skills at all is is just claude.md but for specific usecase?