For the last couple of weeks I have been playing with Claude skills.
It’s a cool way to package knowledge on how to do stuff in a prompt which can be retrieved any time your agent needs it. They work with Claude, but you can easily integrate them in any LLM-based process.
My first experiment was building a skill about our company. Read the website, read some internal documents, read technical documentation, distil a context that can be used any time I’m writing or thinking about business stuff. But the most interesting aspect is that everybody on our team can now use the same context for whatever work they are doing.
The next experiment was to build a skill to create Spritz agents (there’s a very good skill-building skill on Claude, which helps a lot with the building and packaging of skills). I showed Claude the blueprint for agents that we use every day, then showed some fully developed agents.
Then I tried to build a simple “hello world” agent from scratch with this prompt:
Build a Hello World Spritz agent. It should ask for the user name, then use the Anthropic API to generate a greeting. Deploy the agent on AWS using the CLI and test it. Ask me for an API key when you are ready.
I was able to obtain a working agent in about 10 minutes, but it took a few nudges here and there where the skill didn’t cover details.
At the end of this process I prompted:
Based on the experience of this job, update the skill file so next time we will be able to complete the task without obstacles. Do not include in the skill any specific information about this agent or my development context.
The second time it worked end to end.
I have since tried to build a bunch of different agents, always adding more details and nuances to the skills.
This is not (just) about production
Of course this is not about replacing developers, it’s about empowering them. The agents I build will not be used in a production environment; they are mostly proof of concept.
Using skills (or some similar prompting technique) we can capture why various software components are built, not just the how, allowing developers to have a much better context when they need to interact with code they have not created, or even when they go back to a project after a while.
They are an amazing teaching tool to explain to others how things work.
For now we have simply started a GitHub repository with the skills we have built so far. It’s easy to ask Claude, ChatGPT or any other tool to find and retrieve skills from the repo and use them. Now we are figuring out new ways to capture skills from the flow of work we do, from conversations we have, from documents we create.
Yet another step towards an interesting future.