Skills already are "just asking the model". Unless you'd prefer to type out the same instructions every single time?

Skills are literally just Markdown documents that get loaded into context when the /skill-name is invoked.

I disagree. Not all skills are useless. For example, I sometime use Qt for GUI projects and I have found their skills [0] very useful to improve the quality and performance of my projects. I their absence, I would each time have to direct the agents to find the docs or specific tools, wasting tokens and thus decreasing the quality of the output.

[0] https://github.com/TheQtCompanyRnD/agent-skills

I don't think the idea of skills is quite snake oil. It seems you can change what LLM outputs next by what's called few-shot prompting or in-context learning: https://www.promptingguide.ai/techniques/fewshot

not that i know much about the effectiveness of these skill files, i find it odd to call something given for free "snake oil", which i thought referred to the sale of fraudulent products (to the benefit of the snake oil salesperson), typically around healthcare-related stuff.

Lol wut. One of first things people do at a company when they get enterprise LLM tools is share a skill with company-specific color palettes or standards for creating visualizations (I prefer Tufte's principles).

I've found them useful for in house stuff where you are using a specific design system or architecture. But custom everything works best. Are that Claude works well on its own though at this point.

Ya, if im constantly asking a model to do TDD development, you know what would make it a lot easier? A skill.

Nah. Skills are great. But you should write your own.