u/AndyNemmity

https://vexjoy.com/posts/cloud-skills-are-still-just-skills/

The skill ecosystem’s strength is composability. I can take a review skill, pair it with a Go agent, wrap it in a pipeline that saves artifacts at phase boundaries. I can inspect every piece. When something fails, I can diagnose it because I can read the prompts. You can’t compose what you can’t read, and you can’t diagnose failures in a stage you can’t inspect.

If Anthropic ships more features this way, the ecosystem splits into open skills you can build on and closed skills you can pay for. The closed ones will probably be better out of the box because Anthropic has more resources to refine them. The open ones will be more adaptable because you can modify them. That split favors users who can build their own skills. For everyone else, the premium tier becomes the default because the alternative requires expertise that the closed skills no longer help you develop.

I recreated the verification step and it lives in my toolkit where I can see it, modify it, and compose it with everything else. But I have months of accumulated skill-building experience. The shift from open to opaque makes it harder for new people to develop that experience by studying how the built-in skills work.

These are prompt pipelines producing artifacts through phased methodology. That’s what skills are. The question is whether Anthropic ships new capabilities as open skills people can learn from, or as closed services people can subscribe to. The last month suggests a direction.