Skills Are Standardized. Now What?

Anthropic just published a 33-page guide on how to build Claude Skills. It covers file structure, YAML frontmatter, progressive disclosure, MCP integration, testing methodology, distribution, and troubleshooting. It's thorough, well-structured, and immediately useful. It's also the clearest picture yet of where the Skill paradigm ends. What the Guide Gets Right Credit where it's due. The guide codifies several ideas that the community has been converging on independently: Progressive Disclosure. Skills use a three-layer architecture: YAML metadata (always loaded) → SKILL.md body (loaded when relevant) → reference files (loaded on demand). This is the right way to manage context windows. Every token competes for space, and a Skill that dumps 5,000 words of instructions when 50 would suffice is a Skill that degrades everything around it. The MCP + Skill Split. The guide draws a clean line: MCP is the connection layer (what Claude can access), Skills are the knowledge layer (how Claude sh