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Skills aren't a freeform format. The useful ones fit one of five shapes — sequential workflow, multi-MCP coordination, iterative refinement, context-aware selection, domain-specific intelligence. Picking the right shape is most of the design work. Picking the wrong one is most of the bugs.
Most teams ship one of these and call the job done. MCP gives the agent tools. Skills tell it which to use, in what order, with which fallbacks. Without skills, your MCP integration ends with users asking 'okay, what now?'
Every skill lives or dies by a single line in the frontmatter. If the description doesn't trigger, the instructions never load. Most authors spend an hour on a beautiful body and ten seconds on the line that decides whether anyone ever reads it.
Memory, skills, hooks, subagents, plugins. Five layers in a strict order, each earning a specific payoff, each a mistake if you reach for it before a symptom asks for it. The honest part of the ladder is the rungs you don't climb yet.
If your only Claude tab is claude.ai, you're using the smallest surface Anthropic ships. There are five more — Skills, Code, Projects, Cowork, Design — and most teams leave the highest-leverage ones untouched. Here's a diagnostic, a tour in order of leverage (not the marketing order), and a rule for which surface to open next Monday.
Microsoft's Agent Framework 1.0 merges Semantic Kernel and AutoGen into one production SDK for .NET and Python — with A2A and MCP interop, OpenTelemetry baked in, and an LTS commitment. The "which agent framework do we standardize on?" meeting just got shorter.
Ten repos that genuinely change how I work with Claude Code — and a suggested order for adopting them. Install one, use it for a week, keep only the ones that stuck. Never install a bundle.