How AI agents & Claude skills work (Clearly Explained)

– Models are strong, context matters: modern LLMs perform well but require precise contextual guidance and harnessing.
– Prefer skills over agent.mmd: skills use progressive disclosure and avoid adding long token-heavy files to every turn.
– Iterative workflow-first approach: teach the agent by walking through tasks, fix failures, then codify as skills.
– Scale for productivity: start with one agent, add sub-agents and templates when workflows are stable to save tokens and improve reliability.

Quotes:

The models are really, really good. But context still matters.

95% of people don’t need an agent.mmd file.

Models don’t think — they predict tokens.