The Sequence AI of the Week #741: Beyond Prompts: Building Real‑World Agents with Claude’s Skills
Deep diving into a major addition to the Claude stack.
Agentic systems have crossed a threshold: LLMs can reason well enough to orchestrate tools, write and run code, and manipulate files. But most real work still hinges on procedural knowledge—the playbooks, snippets, templates, and fragile gotchas that teams rely on to get tasks done reliably. Claude’s new Agent Skills formalize that know-how as first-class, modular units you can compose into robust agents. Think of Skills as “folders of expertise” your agent can discover, load, and execute on demand—without you endlessly re-prompting or stuffing a giant system message.
This essay walks through how Agent Skills work under the hood, why they’re different from prompts and classic tool plugins, how to design and test them, and how to ship them via the Claude API and Claude Code. Along the way, we’ll sketch practical patterns, tradeoffs, and security considerations, with short code examples you can adapt in minutes.