Claude Agent Skills
Now that Claude Code has become more of a general-purpose agent (see Claude Agent SDK), the next step is to equip agents with domain-specific expertise in the form of skills.
Thus, the next meta-tool has arrived - Claude’s Agent Skills.
Simply put, they are implemented as:
organized folders of instructions, scripts, and resources that agents can discover and load dynamically to perform better at specific tasks…
And a useful analogy for skills is:
Building a skill for an agent is like putting together an onboarding guide for a new hire.
What makes skills different than simple tool or function calling?
Unlike traditional function calling or code execution,
skillsoperate through prompt expansion and context modification to modify how Claude processes subsequent requests without writing executable code. [Ref]
And moreover:
Claude will only access a skill when it's relevant to the task at hand. When used, skills make Claude better at specialized tasks like working with Excel or following your organization's brand guidelines. [Ref]
In other words, it’s like Claude simply picks the right tool for the job in a way that keeps context engineering best practices top of mind.
How does this work?
While working on tasks, Claude scans available skills to find relevant matches. When one matches, it loads only the minimal information and files needed—keeping Claude fast while accessing specialized expertise…
Again…
Think of Skills as custom onboarding materials that let you package expertise, making Claude a specialist on what matters most to you.
While skills are not complicated in implementation, the pattern of using skills gives rise to more dynamism and complexity in the agentic systems we build as developers.
Join us live to do a technical deep dive on skills to take your agents to the next level of domain expertise.
🤓 Who should attend
AI Engineers building agents with Claude Code/Claude Agent SDK.
Anyone interested in building, shipping, and sharing agents at the edge of what’s currently possible!
AI Engineers and AI Engineering leaders who are curious about how emerging best practices for general-purpose agents continue to evolve.
Speaker Bios
Dr. Greg” Loughnane is the Co-Founder & CEO of AI Makerspace, where he is an instructor for their AI Engineering Bootcamp. Since 2021, he has built and led industry-leading Machine Learning education programs. Previously, he worked as an AI product manager, a university professor teaching AI, an AI consultant and startup advisor, and an ML researcher. He loves trail running and is based in Columbus, Ohio.
Chris “The Wiz” Alexiuk is the Co-Founder & CTO at AI Makerspace, where he is an instructor for their AI Engineering Bootcamp. During the day, he is also a Developer Advocate at NVIDIA. Previously, he was a Founding Machine Learning Engineer, Data Scientist, and ML curriculum developer and instructor. He’s a YouTube content creator who’s motto is “Build, build, build!” He loves Dungeons & Dragons and is based in Toronto, Canada.
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