Claude Skills is context management for code execution
Claude Skills was released earlier today by Anthropic. It’s effectively an extension of the Code Execution server-side tool paired with context on how Claude should operate on files in a container. The quirk is that Skills have three progressive layers of context exposure:
- Metadata, which is added to context when a Skill is enabled
- Instructions from a SKILL.md file, which is added to context when a Skill is triggered by Claude
- Other files in a directory in a container for Claude to explore and ingest as needed
I think it's a great primitive: it’s relatively low lift to create a Skill, and it seems like they will only get more useful as instruction following for models improves.
I also think the number of options for managing context is confusing, and adding Skills deepens that problem. For Claude, you now have:
- Skills
- Subagents (if you’re using Claude Code)
- CLAUDE.md files (if you’re using Claude Code)
- MCP servers
- Custom tool calling
- Manual context curation
…and that’s ignoring the many other vendor-specific or neutral options outside of the Anthropic ecosystem.
Notion, for example, is a launch partner. They ask you to download a .zip file and upload it to Claude to add their Skills. But they also have an MCP server with similar tools, an LLMS.txt, and an in-product AI integration.
Regardless, a Cambrian explosion of Skills from companies seems likely if the approach to MCP repeats itself. The barrier to entry for creating a Skill – and sharing it! – is much lower than creating an MCP server, so there could be more Skills than MCP servers in six months. And, like with MCP servers, the Skill directories will follow.
Note: I worked at Anthropic, including technical work on the Code Execution API and Files API, but I did not work on Claude Skills – I'm only working from publicly available materials here. This is a fun launch for me, because it’s a first-class API feature that I didn’t touch while I was at Anthropic, so I get to opine in the open!