Uploaded October 2025 | Updated September 2026, 15 minutes ago
Claude just got a major upgrade — Agent Skills.
Think of them like installable “mini-brains.” Each skill is just a folder with a SKILL.md file that explains how to do a task, plus optional scripts. Claude scans all of them at startup, reads a few tokens of YAML metadata, and only loads full details when you actually need them. That means near-zero context cost until the moment you ask.
It’s a shift from long prompts to modular, composable expertise units that live in your filesystem. Drop in a Markdown file describing a task, and boom — instant capability. The model can even run deterministic code for reliable operations like sorting, compression, or PDF parsing.
As Simon Willison put it: “A skill is a Markdown file telling the model how to do something.” Simple, powerful, and portable — works even with other models.
Tomorrow I’ll compare this system to MCP and show where Claude’s approach truly changes the agent landscape.
I’m Louis-François, PhD dropout, now CTO & co-founder at Towards AI. Follow me for tomorrow’s no-BS AI roundup 🚀
#ClaudeAI #Anthropic #AgentSkills #short
Claude just got a major upgrade — Agent Skills.
Think of them like installable “mini-brains.” Each skill is just a folder with a SKILL.md file that explains how to do a task, plus optional scripts. Claude scans all of them at startup, reads a few tokens of YAML metadata, and only loads full details when you actually need them. That means near-zero context cost until the moment you ask.
It’s a shift from long prompts to modular, composable expertise units that live in your filesystem. Drop in a Markdown file describing a task, and boom — instant capability. The model can even run deterministic code for reliable operations like sorting, compression, or PDF parsing.
As Simon Willison put it: “A skill is a Markdown file telling the model how to do something.” Simple, powerful, and portable — works even with other models.
Tomorrow I’ll compare this system to MCP and show where Claude’s approach truly changes the agent landscape.
I’m Louis-François, PhD dropout, now CTO & co-founder at Towards AI. Follow me for tomorrow’s no-BS AI roundup 🚀
#ClaudeAI #Anthropic #AgentSkills #short
