# Claude Skills 59 Hacker News commenters recommended Claude Skills and 26 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** Reusable markdown instruction packs that Claude loads only when relevant, so it follows project procedures without bloating context. Critics say triggering is unreliable and it locks users into Anthropic. ## Why people recommend it - Loads only when needed, keeps context lean (8 comments): "Skills are good for context management as everything that happens while executing the skill remains invisible to the parent context" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46043788)) "this an optimized mechanism for claude code to retrieve relevant information based on the skill's frontmatter" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46104706)) "Skills do work, as they ground the agent with constrained context for the task it's performing" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48278084)) - Seen as an improvement over MCP (4 comments): "skills for instance are a better approach for most use-cases" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46023175)) "skills are a big improvement compared to what we had before" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46645652)) "skills are sort of MCP 2.0 fixing some of the mistakes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46926206)) - Simple markdown files, easy to write (4 comments): "Having simple Claude Skills as markdowns + a little bit of Ruby made this a lot easier than I expected." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45882443)) "Skills are lazy loaded prompt engineering. They are simple, but powerful." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46253298)) "I love the idea of relying on markdowns and filesystem as universal API" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45923013)) - Composable and reusable across projects (4 comments): "I think Skills are the killer feature because they are a very composable tool" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46399211)) "I have like 50 different ones for personal life, work, dating, whatever" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46638752)) "I've actually built up a set of Claude Skills for creating and using tickets" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46511443)) ## What people warn about - Unreliable, nondeterministic triggering or execution (4 comments): "It's not deterministic but it definitely runs each skill and it's raised a bunch of issues" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47383712)) "Skills don't really accomplish that well and are more unreliable when your target audience is a B2B customer" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49092293)) "it seems I have to specifically tell it to use the "X skill" to trigger it reliably" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46043414)) - Slow and expensive for some tasks (3 comments): "I find the sandboxed execution to be painfully inefficient." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46038842)) "Using an AI skill for a process like that is slower than a script, less trustworthy" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49126994)) "they're incredibly slow, expensive, unreliable, and even slow to create" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49946074)) - Needs local installs, hard to share (2 comments): "I can’t imagine trying to make sure everyone in my company had the latest skill and CLI on their machine." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47713317)) "It is literally impossible because with skills, you may need to install some local CLI" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47714687)) - Proprietary lock-in and uncertain future (2 comments): "Claude Skills are just good documentation wrapped into Anthropic's API in a proprietary way that's designed to foster lock-in." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45949633)) "There is no reason to believe Co-work/Routines/Skills will survive 5 years from now." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47772215)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Superpowers](https://hackerapproved.com/p/superpowers.md): 138 recommend - [grill-me skill by Matt Pocock](https://hackerapproved.com/p/grill-me-skill.md): 39 recommend - [Get Shit Done](https://hackerapproved.com/p/get-shit-done.md): 31 recommend - [Matt Pocock's skills](https://hackerapproved.com/p/matt-pocock-s-skills.md): 27 recommend - [Claude Code skills](https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude-code-skills.md): 21 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Claude Skills", https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude-skills/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).