Yao Dexter

As skills grow in complexity, they may contain too much context to fit into a single SKILL.md , or context that’s relevant only in specific scenarios. In these cases, skills can bundle additional files within the skill directory and reference them by name from SKILL.md . These additional linked files are the third level (and beyond) of detail,... See more

At startup, the agent pre-loads the name and description of every installed skill into its system prompt.

This metadata is the first level of progressive disclosure : it provides just enough information for Claude to know when each skill should be used without loading all of it into context. The actual body of this file is the second level of... See more

When writing tool descriptions and specs, think of how you would describe your tool to a new hire on your team. Consider the context that you might implicitly bring—specialized query formats, definitions of niche terminology, relationships between underlying resources—and make it explicit. Avoid ambiguity by clearly describing (and enforcing with... See more

Agents also tend to grapple with natural language names, terms, or identifiers significantly more successfully than they do with cryptic identifiers. We’ve found that merely resolving arbitrary alphanumeric UUIDs to more semantically meaningful and interpretable language (or even a 0-indexed ID scheme) significantly improves Claude’s precision in... See more

tool implementations should take care to return only high signal information back to agents. They should prioritize contextual relevance over flexibility, and eschew low-level technical identifiers (for example: uuid , 256px_image_url , mime_type ). Fields like name , image_url , and file_type are much more likely to directly inform agents’... See more

By selectively implementing tools whose names reflect natural subdivisions of tasks, you simultaneously reduce the number of tools and tool descriptions loaded into the agent’s context and offload agentic computation from the agent’s context back into the tool calls themselves.

Make sure each tool you build has a clear, distinct purpose. Tools should enable agents to subdivide and solve tasks in much the same way that a human would, given access to the same underlying resources, and simultaneously reduce the context that would have otherwise been consumed by intermediate outputs.

Too many tools or overlapping tools can... See more