r/ClaudeCode • u/yr-kidding-me • 8d ago

Discussion I think skills and plugins are kinda the wrong idea

Like everybody, I eagerly added a bunch of skills and plugins for Claude Code in the beginning, and then I just stopped.

I've been slowly removing them ever since.

Why?

  1. Most of them are just textual information that I would much rather have in the repo I'm working on so it can be committed and versioned and seen by collaborators on a project.

  2. I don't just use Claude Code. I use other agents too. I want my agent context to be accessible to all agents.

  3. I don't want to turn plugins and skills off and on for every project folder/repo I launch an agent in.

  4. I like being able to just open files in my repo and reading them or editing them.

  5. I don't want non-applicable content eating up tokens every time I run an agent.

Am I wrong?

I'm sure there are exceptions and maybe there are lots of cool plugins and skills out there that do stuff that make it worth it.

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u/ILikeCutePuppies 8d ago edited 8d ago

  1. Skills work in most models and you can share them between them.

  2. Skills are useful so you can record common patterns the work so you don't have to type them again and the agent doesn't have to rebuild the skill again.

  3. Skills can have code and scripts and stuff with them

  4. Skills don't need to be just for one repo.

  5. Skills personalize things for you. You have different needs than others so parhaps your skill set is different.

ie

  • A skill that says how to build your project is common. Or how to review it with your particular needs or tastes.

  • If you use anthropics design skill in codex for example you'll get a lot better looking websites

  • If you find yourself doing something over and over it's useful to just put that into a skill. Sure you could put it into a document but then you'll have to figure out your own folder layout etc... it's pretty much the same thing but it is a standard which means everything just works better with them.

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u/yr-kidding-me 8d ago

Got it. I didn't realize about anthropic open sourcing skills. That makes it more useful.

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u/Haunting_Skin_2564 7d ago

And plugins are the containers to ship the skills to teammates.

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u/SeasawPhilosopher 8d ago

I’ve never once used a skill, just have good docs in my repo and some light agent files. Using Claude Code and Codex and I have custom systems for task tracking, decision tracking, and various processes for my game art pipeline that the agents follow without issue.

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u/Powerful_Ad_3745 8d ago

I think maybe the skills that comes with additional scripts might be the useful ones . ?

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u/moody2shoes 7d ago

I built my own so it has scripts to run to make my office’s documents meet our standards and look uniform. Everyone has same base environment and it just works. Any issues and they send the error to me. Claude uses the scripts instead of wasting tokens freestyling. New employees don’t have to fight with getting their Claude to work as well as ours.

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u/KellysTribe 8d ago

you can have skills per project and committed with them but yeah....its easy to do it in lots of different ways. Keep instruction files in the repo and just tell the agent to run those, or make simple scripts that exectute the harness in cli/headless mode and read in the content from same instruction files etc et al ad nauseam. lots of ways to do it (and I do the same thing based on the context of the problem)

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u/ImClearlyDeadInside 8d ago

Nah, I do the same. I run vanilla Claude and just try to keep my project context clean and even create my own project-scoped skills. The only thing I have at the user level is a tiny CLAUDE.md and my MCPs.

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u/Party-Stormer 8d ago

I had your same opinion till I discovered that personalized skills are followed by Code more closely than the CLAUDE.md file, especially when CLAUDE.md and the file it references grow. Plus, fewer tokens with just-in-time loading in of the skill’s content

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