Besides sub-agents, one other key feature that can make
Claude Code better are agent skills,
which is actually an open standard supporting by
other AI coding tools like Cursor, OpenCode, and many
others as well. The idea behind agent skills
is that you define extra dynamically
loaded pieces of context that can come in helpful for
certain tasks. For example, a document or a
combination of documents that describes some best practices
on building React components or Python
classes, or C++ classes, or
whatever applies to your project.
And a skill is simply the combination of a
skill.md file that is always required and will
create one together in a second, and then some optional
additional documents or folders with documents
inside. Skills can even get access to
scripts which may be executed by the AI.
So if you, for example, want to define a cleanup script
that deletes files in a certain way, you can do so using
Python or JavaScript. But in my experience, the most
useful skills for building applications are simply
knowledge skills that provide extra information, extra
instructions, extra best practices and so on.
But if you need to include scripts or extra assets like images
with diagrams, you can do so as well.
But let's now build such a skill.