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Skills and subagents

Picture a busy kitchen. The recipe cards stay in a drawer until a dish calls for one, so nobody reads every card each morning. When a pile of vegetables needs peeling, the cook sends a helper to the sink. The helper does the mess out of sight and brings back one prepped bowl. Claude can work the same way: a card for each routine, and a helper for each messy side job.

Claude can load a saved routine when a job calls for it, and it can hand a side job to a helper. This chapter teaches both: a skill is a folder of steps Claude loads on demand, and a subagent is a helper that works in its own memory. You learn how one skill runs others, and which jobs are worth handing away.

Lessons

• Lesson 1What a skill is
• Lesson 2Skills that call skills
• Lesson 3What a subagent is
• Lesson 4When to hand work to one

Further resources

• Claude Code: Extend Claude with skills: how to write a SKILL.md, where skills load from, and how the description decides when one runs.
• Simon Willison: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP: an independent look at why a skill is only a folder, and why that is cheap to load.
• MindStudio: Claude Code sub-agents explained: how a subagent keeps its work in its own context and returns only a result.