Hi, my name is Otto and in this video we're going to discuss agent skills.

Agents today are pretty intelligent, but they don't always have the domain

expertise you need for real work and skills help solve this. You can think of

skills as organized folders that package expertise that Cloud can automatically

invoke when relevant to the task at hand. And most importantly, these skills

are portable across cloud code, the API as well as cla.ai. And the way skills

work is at startup only the name and description of every installed skill is

loaded in the system prompt. This is going to consume about 30 to 50 tokens

per skill and make Claude aware of the skill's existence. Then when a user

prompt matches a skills description, Claude is going to dynamically load the

full skill.md file into context. And finally, if the skill references other

files or scripts, they are also progressively loaded and run as needed.

This progressive disclosure allows you to install many different skills to

perform complex tasks without bloating your context window. But let's see how

skills fit in with the other Claude features. While skills teach Claude how

to do specialized tasks, Claude.md files tell Claude about the specific project.

Things like your text stack, coding conventions, and repo structure. CloudMD

files live alongside your code in the repository. A CloudMD file may say

things like we [music] use Nex.js JS and Tailwind. But skills on the other hand

are portable expertise that work across any project. So a front-end design skill

can teach Claude your typography standards, animation patterns, and

layout conventions and [music] activate automatically when building UI

components. MCP servers on the other hand provide universal integration, a

single protocol that connects Claude to external context sources like GitHub,

linear, Postgress, and many many others. MCP connects to data. Skills teach

Claude what to do with it. So an MCP server may give Claude access to your

database, but a database query skill can teach Claude your team's query

optimization patterns. Finally, sub agents are specialized AI assistants

with fixed roles. Each sub agent has its own context window, custom prompt, and

specific tool permissions. skills provide portable expertise that any

agent can use. So your front-end developer sub agent can use a component

pattern skill. Your UI reviewer sub agent on the other hand can use a design

system skill, but both can load and use the same accessibility standard skill.

And the best part is these capabilities are designed to work together. Your

cloudMD file sets the foundation. MCP [music] servers connect the data. Sub

agents specialize in their roles and skills bring the expertise making every

piece smarter and more capable. At the end of the day, skills let you package

workflows into reusable capabilities like helping onboard new hires to your

team's coding standards, ensuring every PR follows a specific security best

practices or sharing your data analysis methodology across your team. And that's

how skills can help you achieve more with Claude. We encourage you to give

them a try and see how they can improve your workflows.