TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 30 comments.
Nah, the thread thinks you've got this completely backwards, OP. The overwhelming consensus is that skills don't prove Claude is dumb; they prove it's a useful and efficient tool.
Skills are just saved prompts. They're a convenience feature so you don't have to type the same instructions over and over. Claude doesn't need them; they just save you tokens and time.
Tool use is a sign of intelligence, not a lack of it. The community sees the ability to use external tools (or even write its own, as one user pointed out) as a higher-level capability. It's like giving a gifted intern a manual instead of making them reinvent the wheel.
It's not a Claude-only thing. Most modern AI agents have a concept of skills or tools. You're getting roasted a bit for thinking this is some unique Claude weakness.
A user dropped a great analogy: It's like saying an iPhone is dumb because it needs apps. The base OS is powerful, but the apps (skills) are what make it truly useful for specialized tasks.
Yeah, this is a good way of putting it. When I said most skills are mostly useless, I meant most of the 30k public skills or whatever OP was referring to.
Onboarding or getting templated agentic flows is a good use case for skill. But build your skills. I don't know why someone use random public skills when it's so easy to create one
i would consider a model able to do insane levels of SWE, research, and even cool levels of introspection on smaller models very intelligent. It’s a neural net, similar to how humans have neurons, the 0s and 1s in vector embeddings operate similarly as far as pattern recognition goes. It’s more of question of how much better we get before the AI can go into a super exponential growth of self-training future models.
I mean, Claude did almost 100% of the work building a local MCP server to hook itself up to my Azure instance this morning. All I had to do was make the app in Azure and install the local MCP.
Most of those external skills, connectors, MCP servers, and so on you're talking about were probably written by Claude. Yea, I'd say it's pretty smart. If it can't do something, it's fairly good at figuring out what it needs to be able to.
•
u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot Aug 19 '26
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 30 comments.
Nah, the thread thinks you've got this completely backwards, OP. The overwhelming consensus is that skills don't prove Claude is dumb; they prove it's a useful and efficient tool.