I Stopped Installing Claude Skills. Here's What I Do Instead.

Your ChatGPT, Claude, and Codex already ship with agent skills, and most people have no idea what those skills are doing to their output. This is what a skill actually is, how to tell a working one from a broken one, and how to build your own. Full post + the Skill Building Skill: https://natesnewsletter.substack.com/p/agent-skill-one-job-test?r=1z4sm5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true My Links 🔗 👉🏻 Newsletter: https://natesnewsletter.substack.com/ 👉🏻 X: https://x.com/natebjones 👉🏻 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nate.b.jones 👉🏻 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nate.b.jones What's really happening inside agent skills? The common story is that installing more skills makes your AI more capable. The real question is whether your agent can even see the ones you already have. In this video, I share the inside scoop on how agent skills actually work: - Why a folder arriving on your machine proves nothing about your output - How loading order decides whether your agent ever opens the skill - What a vague description costs you in wasted context window - Where conflicts across 25 skills start dulling every result Skills are the cheapest way to make an agent more useful and the fastest way to make it worse, and what separates the two is whether you ever check what you installed. Chapters: 00:00 The skills your AI already ships with 00:44 What a skill actually is 01:09 Why skills are not apps 01:35 The risk in grabbing skills off GitHub 02:05 The core reframe, agents use and humans read 03:55 Inside a skill, the directory and loading order 05:01 How a badly written skill fails 06:23 Start with trusted sources and a real goal 07:40 Why voice gets your judgment out of your head 09:07 Skill lineage, forking grill-me 10:52 The skill builder and what it handles 14:18 Auditing a library of 25 skills Listen to this video as a podcast. Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0gkFdjd1wptEKJKLu9LbZ4 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ai-news-strategy-daily-with-nate-b-jones/id1877109372