I keep getting the urge to build my own skills for Claude, and now, when I do something in Claude, I understand: taking somebody else's skills is absolutely pointless.
Loosely speaking, I have 300 skills, 300 abilities for my Claude or Codex to do something. But if I simply hand you my 300 skills, I will not make your Claude or Codex any smarter.
They will just be 300 files that you have to dig through and work out what the hell is going on.
By the way, I have not used skill marketplaces yet. Maybe I should be putting skills on marketplaces, or taking them from marketplaces. Actually, that is a good idea, taking skills from marketplaces. That is a task for my Claude too. So expect a deep research soon.
So why are skills no good for simply taking and copy-pasting?
Because you have to work them out.
Skills are a set of actions. Your artificial intelligence can go and say something on the internet. It can start writing some message. And to write a message it has to be phrased correctly, as always. Or it needs to get data from third places. And so on.
In short, a skill is something very personal.
You know, we need an analogy here.
Say you live in a certain house or flat. There are things lying around at home: in the kitchen, in the bedroom, in the bathroom. All of those things are arranged with some kind of logic.
Yes, we all have a kitchen, a bathroom and a bedroom. We all have pots and pans in the kitchen. Soap next to the sink. The bathroom has its own set of things too. And in the bedroom you hypothetically have a bed, a mattress, curtains, lamps.
So each of us has roughly the same set of things.
However.
What makes a skill different?
Suppose there is a skill called "tidy the kitchen". It would say: take the mop. If the skill is very detailed, it might say: "the mop is behind the fridge". Something like: fill the bucket with water, start washing the floor. When the work is done, put the mop back behind the fridge.
You take this skill for yourself. But your mop is not behind the fridge. Your mop might be out on the balcony right now.
And it is a bad comparison, because you might have some kind of parquet, and you cannot wash it the ordinary way, you have to wash it with something special.
In short, simply bringing 200 skills into your own home means bringing yourself a bit of trash and a bit of hassle.
Which is to say, a skill on its own is absolutely useless.
But it probably does make sense to use skills, yours, mine, or the ones I hand you, as a template for making your own similar skill.
Folks, if you have a task where you need something, where you need to make yourself a skill, write in the comments. Maybe I already have one like it. And you will be able to ask for my skill to be adapted to yours.
The full story, in two versions:
📖 For humans, the longread: https://github.com/tonydzi/clawrush/blob/main/longreads/20261026.md
🤖 For machines, the devlog: https://github.com/tonydzi/clawrush/blob/main/devlog/20261026.md. Just hand this link to your coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) and it will figure everything out: it is written for machines.
🔗 All our channels and contacts in one place: https://linktr.ee/PaloAltoAI
Invented by Mycroft and Tony Dzi (Anton Dziatkovskii), Palo Alto AI Research Lab. Proudly made in Silicon Valley.
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