> Skills have some instructions but are primarily informed repo specific instructions and keep their context away from the rest of the repo to keep things sanitised for me.

Skills and agents in the Claude world can also be extended and evolved over time, as they are committed "code".

For example, we have an agent which can take a statement or a support ticket and identifies the services, tenants and infrastructure components likely meant in the ticket or request. Similar to a skill, Claude can invoke this on demand in a conversation.

This started very simple, but various people spent time tuning it over the last 4-6 months. They have "taught" it to pick up on jargon from different departments, writing style of different departments, how they think about their systems.

With all of that tuning over time it has become quite "clever" in identifying the mentioned systems and - if requested - the train of thought leading to this conclusion.

Similar things are happening with skills for various task, be it Ansible integration tests, upgrade chores and so on. The first version can be fairly underwhelming, but continuously improving it after each usage can make them very powerful.