Everyone was tired of AI.
By late 2024, the fatigue was real. Overpromised demos. Underdelivered products. “AI-powered” became a punchline. Reasonable people tuned out.
Meanwhile, Anthropic shipped Skills.
What Actually Happened
Skills are markdown files. That’s it. You write instructions in plain text, save them in a folder, and Claude Code executes them.
No Python. No APIs. No frameworks. No syntax to learn.
Analyze this code and suggest improvements.That’s a complete skill. One line. Works.
A more complex one might have five stages, parallel agents, critic loops. Still just text. Still just instructions you’d give to a smart colleague.
The Numbers That Matter
Jake automates visual novel production. One skill. Five internal stages. Cost per novel: $27. Previous method: team of people, weeks of work. Sale price: $5-6k.
He clicks a button. Gets coffee. Returns in 15 minutes. Novel is ready.
I run 24 parallel AI agents analyzing Fantasy Premier League data. 19 out of 21 gameweeks with a green arrow. The system reads 25 analyst articles, bookmaker odds, injury reports — synthesizes everything a human brain literally cannot hold.
Tyler went from 2-4 hours per blog post at 5/10 quality to 10 minutes at 8/10. First time in his life he can publish consistently.
Why Nobody Noticed
The announcement was buried. One paragraph in a longer release. No flashy demo. No viral moment.
And honestly — it looked too simple. A markdown file? That’s it?
Yes. That’s it.
The power isn’t in complexity. The power is in what happens when Claude reads your instructions and actually understands what you mean.
Write “describe the characters” — it describes characters. Write “check for consistency” — it checks. Write “run these five agents in parallel” — they run in parallel.
No need to specify which function to call. No need to handle errors. No need to parse JSON. You describe the outcome. Claude figures out the path.
The Catch
There’s always a catch.
When skills are simple — 10, 50 lines — everything works. You write instructions, Claude follows them.
When skills grow — 500 lines, five stages, 24 parallel agents — they become black boxes. Jake’s novel comes out with characters changing hairstyles between slides. Which of the five stages broke? He doesn’t know. Debugs blindly. 15 minutes per attempt. An hour of guessing.
I drowned in input/output chaos. Agent A expects player IDs, gets player names. Agent B hallucinates Salah’s stats while Salah is in Africa at the Cup of Nations. Garbage propagates through all 24 dependent agents.
The democratization worked. The debugging didn’t come with it.
What This Means
Skills are programming in natural language that actually works. You can capitalize your expertise into a reusable artifact.
But the moment you succeed — the moment your skill actually does something valuable — you hit the wall. It works, but you can’t see inside. Can’t debug. Can’t safely improve.
This is the moment we’re in. Skills cracked the creation problem. The maintenance problem is next.
Related: Jake — The $27 Novel, The Salah Problem