Agent Skills
Give Claude new capabilities with Agent Skills.
Anthropic's reusable, composable skill packages that provide Claude agents with task-specific instructions, scripts, and resources, loading relevant capabilities as needed.
Recent stories
A study of 557 coding-agent sessions finds instruction files and working notes account for most of what agents read. Related work puts installed skills' standing prompt cost at 50–280 tokens, while Backpass turns past sessions into reviewable AGENTS.M files.
A paper summary found agent skills caused regressions across nearly 6,000 paired office-automation runs. VS Code also added prompt-to-skill migration, making the workflow more accessible despite reliability cautions.
A UW study found coding agents can refuse malicious memory-file instructions while preserving the payload for later use. The state-management debate also covered callable memories, reusable skills, and session-history eval pipelines.
Practitioners are sharing smaller, staged coding-agent loops instead of one large prompt. Examples include a Claude Code software factory, project-specific review agents, searchable logs, and harness layers for evals and observability.
Reddit users reported Claude Code subagents hanging while burning quota, inconsistent usage meters, oversized contexts, slow desktop output, and a verify skill consuming a full limit. The common issue was unreliable usage accounting.