Anthropic this morning introduced Claude Skills, a new pattern for making new abilities available to their models: Claude can now use Skills to improve how it performs specific tasks. Skills are folders that include instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude can load when needed. Claude will only access a skill when it’s relevant to the task at hand. When used, skills make Claude better at specialized tasks like working with Excel or following your organization’s brand guidelines. Their engineering blog has a more detailed explanation. There’s also a new anthropic/skills GitHub repo. Skills are conceptually extremely simple: a skill is a Markdown file telling the model how to do something, optionally accompanied by extra documents and pre-written scripts that the model can run to help it accomplish the tasks described by the skill.

Full in-depth : Anthropic’s Claude Skills, which are conceptually extremely simple, may become a bigger deal than MCP, whose high token usage is its most significant limitation.