[iyn]

Does anyone know how skills relate to subagents? Seems that subagents have more capabilities (e.g. can access the internet) but seems that there's a lot of overlap.

I've asked Claude and this it answered this:

  Skills = Instructions + resources for the current Claude instance (shared context)
  Subagents = Separate AI instances with isolated contexts that can work in parallel (different context windows)
  Skills make Claude better at specific tasks. Subagents are like having multiple specialized Claudes working simultaneously on different aspects of a problem.

I imagine we can probably compose them, e.g. invoke subagents (to keep separate context) which could use some skills to in the end summarize the findings/provide output, without "polluting" the main context window.

[lukev]

How this reads to me is that a skill is "just" a bundle of prompts, scripts, and files that can be read into context as a unit.

Having a sub-agent "execute" a skill makes a lot of sense from a context management, perspective, but I think the way to think about it is that a sub-agent is an "execution-level" construct, whereas a skill is a "data-level" construct.

[throwup238]

Skills can also contain scripts that can be executed in a VM. The Anthropic engineering blog mentions that you can specify in the markdown instructions whether the script should be executed or read into context. One of their examples is a script to extract properties from a PDF file.