ChanderG (u/ChanderG)

ChanderG commented on First impressions of Claude Cowork simonw.substack.com/p/fir... · Posted by u/stosssik

simonw · 25 days ago

I think I made good call on Skills.

They were only announced in October and they've already been ported to Codex and Gemini CLI and VS Code agents and ChatGPT itself (albeit still not publicly acknowledged there by OpenAI). They're also used in Cowork and are part of the internals in Fly's new Sprites. They're doing extremely well for an idea that's only three months old!

This particular post on Cowork isn't some of my best work - it was a first impression I posted within a couple of hours of release (I didn't have preview access to Cowork) just to try and explain what the thing was to people who don't have a $100+/month Claude Max subscription.

I don't think it's "unhealthy" for me to post things like this though! Did you see better coverage of Cowork than mine on day one?

ChanderG · 24 days ago

@brailsafe has accurately captured where I am coming from.

I want more blogs/discussion from the community about the existing tools.

In 3/6 months, how many skills have you written? How many times have you used each skill? Did you have edit skills later due to unseen corner cases, or did they generalize? Are skills being used predominantly at the individual level, or are entire teams/orgs able to use a skill as is? What are the usecases where skills are not good at? What are the shortcomings?

(You being the metaphorical HN reader here of course.)

HN has always been a place of greater technical depth than other internet sites and I would like to see more of this sort of thing on the front page along with day one calls.

ChanderG commented on First impressions of Claude Cowork simonw.substack.com/p/fir... · Posted by u/stosssik

rjtavares · 25 days ago

You made the right call. Skills were added to Antigravity and I immediately started creating and using them. I never used custom MCP servers, but skills were immediately obvious to me.

An example: I made a report_polisher skill that cleans some markdown formatting, check image links, and then uses pandoc to convert it to HTML. I ask the tool itself created the skill, then I just tweaked it.

ChanderG · 24 days ago

Please do open-source your skill and blog about it. Also, would like to hear from your experience after a few months of use. Like - how many times did you use the skill, did you run into some problems later (due to some unexpected thing in the markdown), did the skill generalize - or do you have to make tweaks for particular inputs.

ChanderG commented on First impressions of Claude Cowork simonw.substack.com/p/fir... · Posted by u/stosssik

cliftonc · 25 days ago

I really disagree, skills are really quite useful and there is a lot of usage + community - e.g. take a look at https://github.com/obra/superpowers which I know is used by a lot of people to smooth out their workflow with Claude with great results (not forced spec driven development just better context use + better results). Just this week I used skills to help encapsulate a way to document legacy services ahead of a rewrite (given that my experience now is that rewriting becomes a valid path vs refactoring in many instances): https://github.com/cliftonc/unwind.

ChanderG · 24 days ago

I looked at superpowers, but it felt way too generic. Thanks for sharing unwind. More discussion/blogs about these kind of skills is what I am looking for. I would encourage you to write a blog on unwind, explaining in detail how it has helped you. Even better if you do it after 3 months of use, explaining the journey/evolution of the skill.

ChanderG commented on First impressions of Claude Cowork simonw.substack.com/p/fir... · Posted by u/stosssik

throwup238 · 25 days ago

> (On skills, I think that the reason why there "aren't good examples out there" is because most people just have a stack of impromptu local setups. It takes a bit of work to extract those to throw them out into the public, and right now it's difficult to see that kind of activity over lots of very-excitable hyping, as you rightly describe.

Very much this. All of my skills/subagents are highly tailored to my codebases and workflows, usually by asking Claude Code to write them and resuming the conversation any time I see some behavior I don't like. All the skills I've seen on Github are way too generic to be of any use.

ChanderG · 24 days ago

I thought skills were supposed to be sharable, but (a) ones that are being shared openly are too generic and not useful, (b) people are writing super specific skills and not sharing them.

Would strongly encourage you to open-source/write blog posts on some concrete examples from your experience to bridge this gap.

ChanderG commented on First impressions of Claude Cowork simonw.substack.com/p/fir... · Posted by u/stosssik

linsomniac · 25 days ago

>I don't see any good [skills] examples out there

`/plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills`

https://github.com/anthropics/skills

2 days ago I built a skill to automate a manual workflow I was using: After Claude writes and commits some code, have Codex review that code and have Claude go back and address what Codex finds. I used this process to implement a fairly complete Docusign-like service, and it did a startlingly good job right out of the gate, the bugs were fairly shallow. In my manual review of the Codex findings, it seems to be producing good results.

Claude Code largely built that skill for me.

Implemented as a skill and I've been using it for the last 2 days to implement a "retrospective meeting runner" web app. Having it as a skill completely automates the code->review->rework step.

ChanderG · 24 days ago

I looked that the official repo of skills, but I found those very generic and artificial.

I would encourage you to write up a blog post of your experience and share a version of the skill you have built. And then follow up with a blog post after 3 months with analysis like how well the skill generalized for your daily use, whether you had to make some changes, what didn't work etc. This is the sort of content we need more of here.

ChanderG commented on First impressions of Claude Cowork simonw.substack.com/p/fir... · Posted by u/stosssik

i-blis · 25 days ago

Related argument (as to SKILL.md not being a big thing) in the following blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46644086

ChanderG · 24 days ago

Nice - this is the kind of blogs we need more of. Getting into real experience.

ChanderG commented on First impressions of Claude Cowork simonw.substack.com/p/fir... · Posted by u/stosssik

ChanderG · 25 days ago

First thing I did here is a grep for "Skills" and no hits. Simon's posts are well upvoted here and Anthropic/Claude is a bit of HN darling, but I think they are playing the hype game a bit too well here.

3 months ago, Anthropic and Simon claimed that Skills were the next big thing and going to completely change the game. So far, from my exploration, I don't see any good examples out there, nor is a there a big growing/active community of users.

Today, we are talking about Cowork. My prediction is that 3 months from now, there will be yet another new Anthropic positioning, followed up with a detailed blog from Simon, followed by HN discussing possibilities. Rinse and Repeat.

This is something I have experienced first hand participating in the Vim/Emacs/Ricing communities. The newbie spends hours installing and tuning workflows with the mental justification of long-term savings, only to throw it all away in a few weeks when they see a new, shinier thing. I have been there and done that. For many, many years.

The mature user configures and installs 1 or 2 shiny new things, possibly spending several hours even. Then he goes back to work. 6 months later, he reviews his workflow and decides what has worked well, what hasn't and looks for the new shiny things in the market. Because, you need to use your tools in anger, in the ups and downs, to truly evaluate them in various real scenarios. Scenarios that won't show up until serious use.

My point is that Anthropic is incentivized in continuously moving goalposts. Simon is incentivized in writing new blogs every other day. But none of that is healthy for you and me.

ChanderG commented on I Was Wrong About Claude Code Skills malvik.de/blog/claude-cod... · Posted by u/svenmalvik

NitpickLawyer · a month ago

> But now, for the first time, I tried Claude Code's Skills, and they blew me away, because I wasn't aware that those skills are injected automatically

They work so well because they're also "baked in" the training run of the model. The concept is simple, but training it to actually use it unlocks the "wow" factor. (using cc with other models, not trained specifically for this, reveals how big training is)

They also highlight this in their docs, you don't need to teach claude about skills. Or to write new skills. It "knows" what skills are, how to use, edit them etc.

ChanderG · a month ago

Is there an Anthropic document that says this? I mean about the "training" portion. The docs I am seeing talks about Claude Code or Desktop being able to use skills - that's a totally different matter.

ChanderG commented on Inverse Parentheses kellett.im/a/inverse-pare... · Posted by u/mighty-fine

ChanderG · 2 months ago

Opened this excitedly, thinking I was going to get something related to S-expressions/Lisp, was disappointed...

ChanderG commented on I tried every todo app and ended up with a .txt file al3rez.com/todo-txt-journ... · Posted by u/al3rez

ChanderG · 6 months ago

Shameless plug: I built [1] and use a small magit like interface on top of org-mode.

I love org for all its bells and whistles and use them in various ways. But most of the time I need a small subset of org in a form-factor that allows ease of use.

[1] https://github.com/ChanderG/toodoo.el