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Claude Code Emergent Behavior: When Skills Combine
- fooqux 9mo agoI didn't see any emergent behavior, just combining of skills (which I'll admit looks useful). Calling this emergent is click bait.
- ryanthedev 9mo agoyou're not wrong. my goal was for more playful.
- furyofantares 9mo agoWell, it's a little odd, because up until a couple months ago we had to have everything we wanted it to be able to do in context anyway.
- oooyay 9mo agoYeah, after reading this I was thinking, "how is this different from agents using a combination of tools, resources, and prompts?" They do surprising things sometimes but it's not particularly novel of Claude Code.
- ryanthedev 9mo agoi see it as skills being logical grouping of a set of prompts, which achieve a goal. Like my optimize-critical-path skill. It's more than a single prompt, but less than an entire agent. I find skills to be the tools you use on the fly. Like how I might have a wrench,screw-driver, hammer in my tool box. tools vs skills is all about context efficiency from what I see. and yes, this isn't novel of claude. but they are the first to offer this abstraction.
- oooyay 9mo ago> they are the first to offer this abstraction. My point is that Skills are not the first to do this. Well written MCPs are dynamic workflow engines. Skills are like a more user focused and slimmed down version of MCPs. It'd be interesting to see a comparison of a well written MCP compared to a skill in terms of task competency.
- ryanthedev 9mo agoAhhhh. I see now. Now that you mention it, i can see a future where claude may offer a "skills" feature and codex offers a "talent" feature. where they are essentially the same things, but specific to that vendor. reminds me how each cloud has the same offerings but different products.
- joshuacc 9mo agoCodex added skills support recently. It appears to work exactly the same as Claude Code.
- ryanthedev 9mo agoohhh! I'm gonna have to try that out. Thankfully everybody is still playing nice hahah!
- joshribakoff 9mo agoYeah, it’s literally talked about and documented by the vendor as an intended characteristic of the design.
- vessenes 9mo agoRegardless of title, it’s a good little reminder that I hadn’t thought of - skills can use skills. This makes sense - a skill is just a pre-loaded context Claude instance, so why not? But I also tend to think of one skill at a time. Thanks for the write up.
- ryanthedev 9mo agoIf you come across any other skills that could be fun to combine, lmk!
- NamlchakKhandro 9mo agoSkills are just prompts the agent can choose to load. That's it
- sshine 9mo agoSkills are prompts the agent can choose to load. (I've rephrased the sentence by removing "just" -- the novel thought here is that the agent's use of a skill can automatically trigger another skill, which is somewhat emergent.)
- kingkongjaffa 9mo agoYou can make a router skill that describes how to use the other skills together. I'm experimenting with this now but my core problem is still How to Make Claude Code Skills Activate Reliably. During testing today I asked a task I knew should have activated a skill and claude just did it without the skill instead. This might help: https://scottspence.com/posts/how-to-make-claude-code-skills-activate-reliably https://scottspence.com/posts/how-to-make-claude-code-skills...
- falloutx 9mo agoI wonder how complex we can make skills if claude code was able to read them dynamically. I am envisioning one session generates the skill.md while other session works on it and then I envision they both editing each other's skill.md. just a little dream I have, sorry for yapping.
- ryanthedev 9mo agoNo need to be sorry! That's why I posted this. That's what I have been doing as I'm building these skills out. There is a really fun testing/tdd loop that runs these skills through multiple prompts with baselines and tests it all out.
- kingkongjaffa 9mo agoMy big gripe with skills is getting claude webapp and claude code to get them to invoke them in the right situations (often unexpected situations) without explicitly telling it directly to use skill x + skill y. Ideally I would build a bunch of atomic skills that combine well and claude just uses them naturally when the situation arises.
- ryanthedev 9mo ago1000000% agree. That's a problem I'm working on right now. I did learn about hooks, which is a way to constantly remind it. But that's too generic. At some point I plan to do some ralph wiggum loop stuff maybe to hash out the best way for triggers to work.
- kingkongjaffa 9mo agoI'm reading up on this right now. Here's some prior work that might be interesting: https://scottspence.com/posts/how-to-make-claude-code-skills-activate-reliably https://scottspence.com/posts/how-to-make-claude-code-skills... Edit: I realise it might look kind of weird I posted this link in 2 comments on this thread - disclaimer I am not the author of that random blog post, just sharing what I found!
- rafaquintanilha 9mo agoYear is wrong in the article by the way. It says 2025.
- ryanthedev 9mo agoFUCKING AI HAHAHA, thank you! fixed.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- jackfranklyn 9mo ago[flagged]
- ryanthedev 9mo agoturtle, turtle... It's really going to be interesting to see how this tech evolves.
- _joel 9mo ago404 for me
- miquong 9mo agohttps://vibeandscribe.xyz/posts/2026-01-07-emergent-behavior.html https://vibeandscribe.xyz/posts/2026-01-07-emergent-behavior... (year fixed below)
- brandensilva 9mo agoRedirects my man, Learn em and love them
- nadis 9mo agoGetting a 404 Not Found for this post - is the blog down? I was really curious to read it given the comments + full disclosure my co-founder recently wrote about a similar topic ("To Tool or Not to Tool") https://blog.codeyam.com/p/to-tool-or-not-to-tool https://blog.codeyam.com/p/to-tool-or-not-to-tool . I wanted to see how this is similar or different with the focus on Claude Code + Skills in a more literal sense vs. tools in a more abstract sense.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- mkw5053 9mo agoKiss of death? I'm seeing "404 Not Found nginx/1.18.0 (Ubuntu)"
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- amatecha 9mo agoPost has moved to https://vibeandscribe.xyz/posts/2026-01-07-emergent-behavior.html https://vibeandscribe.xyz/posts/2026-01-07-emergent-behavior...
- ryanthedev 9mo agodoh! I messed up. Thank you
- ironbound 9mo agoNo AI could code a better seahorse emoji xD
- d4rkp4ttern 9mo agoA skill that creates other skills can be very useful as well. E.g. you could have: - a set of skills to use design patterns of a library - a skill to add to this skill-set -- either when prompted by user or autonomously via a stop-hook E.g. I set up this combination for design patterns for the Langroid[1] LLM-Agent framework: https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools/tree/main/plugins/langroid/skills https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools/tree/main/pl... [1] https://github.com/langroid/langroid https://github.com/langroid/langroid
- joshribakoff 9mo agoHaving too many skills can be a mistake. Getting too meta can be a mistake. I wrote about it on my blog too.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]