Anthropic just said skills are hard

Anthropic published a thoughtful guide to making skills. It is worth reading, but it's a map of work you should not have to do. The Claude Code team wrote a piece on how they use agent skills . If you make skills, read it. It is honest and tells you something important: making a good skill is real work. Here's what the guide covers. It sorts skills into nine categories. It explains progressive disclosure, where the agent knows which files to load and when. It covers scripts, config files, combining skills together, and writing the description so the model reaches for the skill at the right moment. All of that is true and useful. It is also a lot to learn. And most of it exists only because you are doing the work by hand. We're SkillsCake . We make and score agent skills all day. So we read this guide a little differently than someone meeting skills for the first time. Here's what we think. Skills are infinite The guide splits skills into types: library reference, verification, and so on. That is a helpful way to teach a class. It is not what a skill actually is. A skill is prose that tells an agent how to do one thing, sometimes with scripts attached. The set of possible skills is not nine boxes. It is every job you could describe in writing; it's infinite. Categories are how a person gets a handle on something that open-ended. They are scaffolding for learning, not the shape of the thing. This matters because the moment you think in categories, you start bending your skill to look like the example in its bucket. Your real job rarely fits the bucket. The best engineered skill is the one written for your exact task, by an expert. Doing it yourself might not be worth it Progressive disclosure, scripts, config, descriptions tuned for the model, gotchas earned by failing, and eval loops: none of that is busywork. It's how a good skill gets built by hand. The guide is not overcomplicating anything. It is being honest about what the manual path costs. But that is the poin