Most teams misuse Claude Skills in one of two ways. They either turn SKILL.md into a dumping ground, or they never graduate from giant copy-pasted prompts. Both approaches are sloppy. If you want Skills to work in a real dev workflow, you need to treat them like code and operations logic, not like prompt poetry. Claude Skills are directories anchored by SKILL.md , with optional scripts, references, and assets. They work because of progressive disclosure. The agent starts by loading only compact metadata such as the skill name and description, then reads the full instructions only when the task matches. That lets an agent keep many skills available without bloating every session from the start. Anthropic's own guidance makes the intended division of labour pretty clear. CLAUDE.md is for durable, always-on project context. Skills are for reusable knowledge, playbooks, and invocable workflows that should load on demand.…