Skills only work if you have a full blown code execution environment with a model that can run ls and cat and execute scripts and suchlike.

The models are really good at driving those environments now which makes skills the right idea at the right time.

Why do you need code execution envs? Could the skill not just be a function over a business process, do a then b then c?

Turns out that basic shell commands are a really powerful for context management. And you get tools which run in shells for free.

But yes. Other agent platforms will adopt this pattern.

I prefer to provide CLIs to my agent

I find it powerful how it can leverage and self-discover the best way to use a CLI and its parameters to achieve its goals

It feels more powerful than providing pre-defined set functions as MCP that will have less flexibility as a CLI

I was fairly certain this was incorrect, but I decided to look it up before I responded. I'm glad I did. Simon is correct.

"Skills require the Code Execution Tool beta, which provides the secure environment they need to run."

https://claude.com/blog/skills

I still don't really understand `skills` as ... anything? You said yourself that you've been doing this since llama 2 days - what do you mean by "become available"?

It is useful in a user-education sense to communicate that it's good to actively document useful procedures like this, and it is likely a performance / utilization boost that the models are tuned or prompt-steered toward discovering this stuff in a conventional location.

But honestly reading about skills mostly feels like reading:

> # LLM provider has adopted a new paradigm: prompts

> What's a prompt?

> You tell the LLM what you'd like to do, and it tries to do it. OR, you could ask the LLM a question and it will answer to the best of its ability.

Obviously I'm missing something.

It’s so simple there isn’t really more to understand. There’s a markdown doc with a summary/abstract section and a full manual section. Summary is always added to the context so the model is aware that there’s something potentially useful stored here and can look up details when it decides there moment is right. IOW it’s a context length management tool which every advanced LLM user had a version of (mine was prompt pieces for special occasions in Apple notes.)