Skills
How do skills stay cheap in context?
Skills scale through progressive disclosure: the agent loads a skill in levels, so a large library costs almost nothing in context until one becomes relevant.
The reason skills scale is progressive disclosure. The agent does not load every skill in full. It works in levels: the short description is always visible so the agent knows the skill exists, the full instructions load only when the skill matches the task, and the heavier bundled resources load only if they are actually used.[1] The result is that a large library of skills costs almost nothing in context until one becomes relevant.
References
- Agent Skills — Overview — Anthropic