Claude Skills: packaged capabilities loaded on demand into context
In one sentence Anthropic introduces Skills: bundles of instructions + scripts + resources that Claude loads automatically when a task needs them. De facto replaces most custom enterprise system prompts.
Anthropic introduces "Claude Skills", a new primitive for teaching Claude how to do a specific task (compile a report, process an Excel, generate a formatted PDF). A Skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md (instructions), optionally Python scripts and reference files.
The key point: Claude only loads them when needed. You have 50 skills installed; when a request comes in, the model only reads the metadata of all of them (a few lines each), decides which is needed, and loads only that one. Context doesn't get bloated with never-used instructions.
For enterprises it's an organizational shift: instead of a monolithic megaprompt ("here's how to handle requests"), each team writes its own skills, shares them in the repo, and Claude composes them on the fly. It's "lego" for AI capabilities.
Companies
Anthropic
Tools
Claude Skills, Claude Agent SDK
Tags
Sources