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Anthropic SKILLs – Prime Example of Red Riding Hood Principle

In Albert and my book, Albert introduced the "Red Riding Hood Principle". You remember the story, right? A young, naive girl strays off of the well trodden path and ends up in a lot of trouble.

This is true for you when building AI applications. If you provide context to the agent that is familiar – similar to the training – then the agent will be able to navigate the terrain more easily.

Anthropic SKILLs is such a good example of this. Anthropic realized that in Claude Code, it had trained a model and constructed an agent to be exceptionally good at navigating file systems, reading files, and managing context. Further, the filesystem metaphor provides natural navigational affordances. The agent can look at the directory structure and get a big picture of what exists, and an agent can grep around for details – much like a developer would do.

You should consider all of this when building your own agents! SKILLs benefits from the filesystem metaphor, so it bears to reason that your domain could benefit as well – imagine presenting graph-based knowledge or filter-based search as if it was a file structure.

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