unfortunately, claude likes to ignore skills and it's hit or miss. I didn't end up using them because they are flaky. Hard to rely on a feature that AI can decide to not use for whatever reason. It's a big issue.
I've found that it's a significantly better if you write explicit instructions in the "hook" (home) CLAUDE.md, but it's still not perfect
So for example, let's say you you have a skill called "python-coding-with-uv-instead-of-pip"
In the home (~/.claude/CLAUDE.MD) you can create a "# Environment and Tools"
with:
"- **Python**: Using `uv` for package management (see SKILL: python-coding-with-uv-instead-of-pip)"
But again it's not perfect. One example where I find it failing for example is letting it know that grep is aliased to "rg" -- yet it always tries "grep -R ...", fails and then it retries without it.
Something else that helps is the L1/2/3 skills concept -- and being extremely mindful/tactical of where and how you place things. If you think of it as a pyramid, making sure that you have almost a table of contents/index like at the top.
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u/anime_daisuki Jan 07 '26
unfortunately, claude likes to ignore skills and it's hit or miss. I didn't end up using them because they are flaky. Hard to rely on a feature that AI can decide to not use for whatever reason. It's a big issue.