{
  "video_id": "reddit_1uhed8x",
  "channel_slug": "ClaudeAI",
  "channel_handle": "r/ClaudeAI",
  "title": "Why are all the Claude Code skill files I see online completely pointless?",
  "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1uhed8x/why_are_all_the_claude_code_skill_files_i_see/",
  "external_url": null,
  "upload_date": "20260627",
  "published_at": "2026-06-27T21:23:07+00:00",
  "transcript": "Every skill file I come across looks like this:\n\n“You are an expert full-stack developer with 20 years of experience in React, Node.js, and TypeScript. Always write clean, maintainable code.”\n\nClaude already knows all of this. You’re not teaching it anything.\n\nThe whole point of a skill is to fix something Claude consistently gets wrong. Not to explain what a developer is.\n\nAnd Claude gets a lot wrong. Stuff a real developer would never skip:\n\n\t•\tPerformance is never considered upfront. No thought for render-blocking resources, what to inline, what to defer. You find out at Lighthouse time.  \n\t•\tMobile layout is an afterthought. A real developer thinks responsive from line one.  \n\t•\tNobody ever mentions CSP or a WAF before deploying something public. A senior dev would bring it up unprompted.  \n\t•\tAccessibility gets skipped entirely. Clickable divs instead of buttons, no focus management, ARIA slapped on at the end if at all.\n\nThese are the things skills should be fixing. Not reminding Claude that it’s a “world class engineer.”\n\nAm I missing something? Are there actually good skill files out there? Because I can’t find them.\n\n\n\n--- Top Comments ---\n\n\n[1 upvotes] **TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 40 comments.**\n\nLet's get this straight: **the community overwhelmingly agrees with you, OP.** Those generic \"You are an expert developer\" skills are considered outdated, useless \"motivational wallpaper\" from the 2023-2024 era. The consensus is that they're \"artifacts from when people thought prompt engineering was a profession\" and are completely unnecessary for modern models like Opus 4.8.\n\nThe thread's key takeaway is that a good skill is a **\"scar, not a resume.\"** It should be a highly specific set of instructions to fix a recurring mistake Claude makes or to automate a repetitive workflow that is unique to *you*. This is why you don't see many great public skills—the best ones are hyper-specific to a user's private projects and wouldn't be useful to anyone else.\n\nIf you're looking for good examples to learn from, the community recommends:\n*   **Anthropic's Official Skills:** Check their GitHub for patterns on how to properly structure skills for tool use and APIs.\n*   **The `Superpowers` Collection:** A popular public repository of more advanced skills.\n*   **Anthropic's Free Courses:** They teach you how to think about \n\n[43 upvotes] That wording was very common last year ish. The idea was to push the model in to the vector space of a \"senior engineer\" so by listing those items you where sort of biasing it towards senior output. Total trash these days. You don't need those sort of lists anymore.\n\n  \nI think the best skills are the ones that lets claude work with files or services. It's very easy to have claude create your won skills. Just think of some service or file you need claude to work with, and ask it to develop a skill for that task.\n\nAn example would be gemini image generation, you can have cluade make it's self a skill that allows it to use gemini API to generate images, as it needs. \n\nThere are for sure good pre-made skills out there. But, always remember, a skill from an un-trusted person can be very unsafe. Always validate skills before using them, (at least check the github star count).\n\n[28 upvotes] This are artificats from when people thought prompt engineering was a profession \n\n[13 upvotes] Those aren't Skills. They are created by people who dont understand how to properly use Skills and are still stuck in 2024 using ChatGPT. With current models shit like \"you are a world class engineer\" is completely useless. The models are way way smarter and stronger then 2 years ago. Skills fits nicely because of higher intelligence and context window, Skills can fit examples, references, hooks, patterns and even scripts.\n\nYou should look into Anthropic's official Skills via their Github and then use those as patterns and inspiration how to create Skills, or ofcourse just use Claude.",
  "transcript_chars": 3981,
  "ingested_at": "2026-06-28T01:30:29.388873+00:00",
  "source": "reddit",
  "yt_meta": {
    "score": 160,
    "upvote_ratio": 0.96,
    "num_comments": 62,
    "author": "TimAtMongoDB",
    "is_self": true
  }
}