[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.