Skills & MCP
Extending agents with skills and tools that actually fire when they should.
Let Claude Write Your Skills
Stop hand-writing SKILL.md files. Anthropic’s official skill-creator skill interviews you in plain English, then drafts, tests, and packages the skill for you.
Tip #023Skill Triggers That Fire
Claude decides whether to use a skill from its name and description alone, never the full file — here’s how to write a description that actually fires.
Tip #024Give Your Skill a Report Card
Numeric self-scores lie. Build a pass/fail evals file for your skill’s output, grade it with a separate clean-context agent, and loop until every check passes.
Tip #187Index Your Docs, Don’t Dump Them
Stuffing every methodology doc into your agent’s context burns the budget and buries the one file the task needs. Build a lightweight index that maps task to doc, and load only what’s needed.
Tip #195Adapting Someone Else’s Methodology? Rewrite It and Sign It
The moment you adapt someone’s AI rules or methodology into your workspace, you own it. Rewrite it in your own voice, strip the vendor branding, and sign it — a stale copy of someone else’s file rots.
Tip #196Keep Skills Flat, Keep Helpers in Source
Nesting scripts and helpers inside each AI skill duplicates untested logic that quietly drifts. Keep skills as flat, self-contained methodology files; put deterministic code in your real, tested source tree.
Tip #197Audit Your Skill Library Quarterly With Grep
AI skills rot like code, silently. Every quarter, grep your skill library for unreferenced files, front-matter drift, and stale tool names so your agent stops loading the wrong thing.
Tip #198Past 700 Lines, Split the Skill
An 800-line AI skill file gets skimmed, not read. Past about 700 lines or when it covers multiple topics, split it via progressive disclosure — keep the original filename as an overview entry so every reference still resolves.
Tip #199Force an Assumptions Block Before Any Non-Trivial Task
The most common way an AI agent wastes your time is running with wrong assumptions on ambiguous requirements. A four-line assumptions block turns silent guesses into a cheap checkpoint.
Tip #200Tell Your AI That Sycophancy Is a Failure Mode
By default your assistant agrees with you and ships your bad idea with enthusiasm. Make it name the problem, quantify the downside with a number, and propose an alternative before it accepts your call.
Tip #201Score Your CLAUDE.md Like a Linter
Your CLAUDE.md loads into context on every turn, so bloat, contradictions, and platitudes tax every prompt. Score it like a linter — start at 100, deduct for each contradiction and redundancy — then cut what lost points.
Tip #202Every Registered MCP Server Costs Tokens on Every Turn
Every registered MCP server injects its tool schema into context on every turn, whether you use it or not. Audit what’s registered, replace cloud servers with plain CLIs where you can, and unregister the rest.