Lessons from Building Claude Code: How We Use Skills
Anthropic engineers share practical lessons from maintaining hundreds of Claude Code skills internally. The post categorizes skills into nine types—library reference, product verification, data fetching, business process automation, code scaffolding, code quality, CI/CD, runbooks, and infrastructure ops—and offers concrete writing tips: focus on non-obvious hints, build gotchas sections, use the filesystem for progressive disclosure, avoid over-constraint, design setup flows, treat the description field as a trigger for the model, store memory (logs, JSON, SQLite), and bundle scripts/libraries to reduce token waste. It also covers distribution strategies (in-repo vs. marketplace), skill composition, and usage measurement via PreToolUse hooks. A must-read for anyone building agent-centric workflows.