Claude Skills for Devs 2026: SKILL.md, Bundling & Ship
Learn how Claude agent skills replace bloated system prompts: SKILL.md structure, progressive disclosure, bundling scripts, and shipping to production in 2026.
Chapter 1: Why Agent Skills Exist: The Context Window Problem in 2026 Every developer who has built a serious agent has hit the same wall. You start with a tight system prompt — maybe 400 words. It works. Then you add a rule about how your team formats commit messages. Then the deployment checklist. Then the six edge cases in your billing logic that the model keeps getting wrong. Then the internal API conventions. Eighteen months later your system prompt is 40,000 tokens, nobody remembers why half of it is there, and the model still forgets the commit message rule....