It feels like off late all I am doing here is linking to Simon Willison, but he’s on the money here:

Claude Code is, with hindsight, poorly named. It’s not purely a coding tool: it’s a tool for general computer automation. Anything you can achieve by typing commands into a computer is something that can now be automated by Claude Code. It’s best described as a general agent. Skills make this a whole lot more obvious and explicit.

I find the potential applications of this trick somewhat dizzying. Just thinking about this with my data journalism hat on: imagine a folder full of skills that covers tasks like the following:

Where to get US census data from and how to understand its structure
How to load data from different formats into SQLite or DuckDB using appropriate Python libraries
How to publish data online, as Parquet files in S3 or pushed as tables to Datasette Cloud
A skill defined by an experienced data reporter talking about how best to find the interesting stories in a new set of data

A skill that describes how to build clean, readable data visualizations using D3
Congratulations, you just built a “data journalism agent” that can discover and help publish stories against fresh drops of US census data. And you did it with a folder full of Markdown files and maybe a couple of example Python scripts.

Read his blog. It’s awesome. Don’t miss.