It's possible I invented skills before they were common. I've always had some instructions in agents.md that are something like "when working with typescript, read prompts/conventions.ts.md, when working with our fooBar module, read prompts/foobar.md"

I'm not sure if this differs greatly from skills. Maybe my wording makes these "skills" less likely to be read at the correct times, but I haven't seen an issue.

I try to keep agents/Claude.md as tiny as possible. With high level "truths" that don't change. Stack used, invariants, file structure, and some scripts.

Skills are more for things you do often. I run mutation tests, type check,linting,etc. I _could_ just prompt and copy/paste the same prompt each time I need to, or I can just run /tests.

I also have skills for specialized tasks I need every once in a while, like a ux skill, a text skill optimized for xyz, etc.

Most guidance I’ve read, and experienced success with, is keeping a lean agents.md file and building out a tree of docs or skills that an agent can navigate via progressive disclosure.

Depends on how much information and details you have. The agents.md always goes into context. Detailed testing or process information might be excessive, when agent is working on UI. Skills are pulled when needed.

yes, it is. it's almost exactly the same thing.

skills are just an agents.md broken up into chunks so you can manage and share them separately. unfortunately there's no real good workflow for managing or sharing them separately, so most people end up treating them exactly the same way they do agents.md.

Skills are evaluated by short description whether to read them into context.

Skills itself may be lengthy so...