[croon]

It's not about one with skill and one without, but about one with skill vs one with regular old human documentation for stuff you need to know to work on a repo/project, or even more accurate comparison, take the skill and don't load it as a skill and just put it as context in the repo.

I think the main conflict in this thread is whether skills are anything more than just structuring documentation you were lacking in your repo, regardless if it was for Claude or Steve starting from scratch.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

well, the key difference is that one is auto-injected into your context for dynamic lookup and the other is loaded on-demand as needed and is contingent upon the llm discovering it.

That difference alone likely accounts for some not insignificant discrepancies. But without numbers, it's hard to say.