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Book Overview & Buying
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Table Of Contents
Agentic Coding with Claude Code
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In this chapter, we explored agent skills from both a practical and architectural perspective. We began by understanding the gist of agent skills through a hands-on comparison between prompting an agent directly and using a skill to encapsulate structured behavior. Through the HookHub example, we observed how skills enable progressive context loading, allowing the agent to dynamically inject only the relevant instructions when needed instead of bloating the main context window. We then went deeper by creating a custom project-level skill, integrating auxiliary scripts, modifying its behavior, and even enhancing it to invoke the Claude CLI. This allowed us to see how skills can package opinionated workflows, combine deterministic execution with AI-generated output, and still allow fallback behavior when scripts fail. Finally, we positioned agent skills within the broader agentic landscape by comparing them with MCP and subagents, clarifying how each primitive operates in terms...