> So far my experience with skills is that they slow down or confuse agents unless you as the user understand what the skill actually contains and how it works. In general I would rather install a CLI tool and explain to the agent how I want it used vs. trying to get the agent to use a folder of instructions that I don't really understand what's inside.

For Claude Code I add the tooling into either CLAUDE.md or .claude/INSTRUCTIONS.md which Claude reads when you start a new instance. If you update it, you MUST ask Claude to reread the file so it knows the full instructions.

Most LLM "harnessing" seems very lazy and bolted on. You can build much more robustly by leveraging a more complex application layer where you can manage state, but I guess people struggle building that

I mean, yes. You should do exactly that: instruct an agent on how to do something you understand in terms you can explain.

Putting that in a `.md` file just means you don’t need to do it twice.