Claude Code SKILLS.md are a token trap.
Just a video where I monologue about my feelings on why SKILLS.md files are not the future, why they are intentionally a dark pattern to lock you to a cloud vendor, and how you can avoid them.
Skills are a way to, with written language, give instructions and "code" to tools like Claude Code/Cowork, Codex, and more - except they actually lead to you burning tokens massively to build a behavior that will be hard to break or expensive to maintain in the near future.
Could be my own personal tin-foil hat - could just be a text file.
**Chapters**
0:00 Intro
0:55 Skills.md - what is that?
2:17 S…
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Chapters (14)
Intro
0:55
Skills.md - what is that?
2:17
SKILLS.md are just prompt engineering again
4:00
Skills bloat and the token trap
4:21
Examples of Skill bloat
5:30
How this works against you
7:00
Lets talk about token cost
8:24
Token costs are NOT going down
10:10
The bloat is the lock-in
12:22
The prime example of context bloat - GStack
14:40
Rich people - you can ignore this tbh
15:38
These tools are built with cloud in mind
16:58
MCPs actually might be the way to save us???!
18:29
That’s basically it
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