In the first workshop last Thursday, David made a comment to the effect that it might have been better if he hadn’t called things for the Robot Assistant “skills”, since that’s a word that has a specific meaning for Anthropic and Claude. It sounds like he really was using skills in the same sense as Anthropic at the start, but things diverged. I ran into a couple of places where Claude had some challenges because the term “skill” is overloaded with the Robot Assistant context, and I really did want to use a Claude Skill.
So, after some discussion, I made a good back up of my RA folder and then had Claude rename things. I now have a Runbook, which is made up of Procedures. That works for me, given my background in IT. I can now ask my RA to review the runbook, update the procedure for , … The language is still natural (for me), and there’s no longer an issue with the term Skill being overloaded.
Your mileage may vary.
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“There are two really hard problems in computer science. Naming things, cache consistency, and off by one errors.”
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I‘d be interested in how the renaming worked. I just started the field guide, and I’m running into issues with what we’re calling skills because I already built skills that are in /.claude
Also think would be wise to change terminology as always getting responses like no skill exists despite it being in my RA skill index.
I was originally using or storing skills in my PKM as per the guidelines in the course. This works great if you’re only using Claude co-work to interact with your PKM vault, However, I also use Claude for business, and in that respect I’m sharing business skills, etc., with a colleague. I’ve moved all my skills out of the PKM vault into Dropbox.
I have added the following into my Claude.md file. (I still keep a Claude.md file in the root folder of my PKM, so if I just load that up, everything works fine. )
Skills
All skill files live in C:\Users\BobbyGallagher\Dropbox\Claude Cowork\Skills — this is the only location for skills. The PKM vault (Obsidian) is for notes only (daily notes, meeting notes, PKM content). Never write skill files to the PKM vault.
If the Skills folder is not accessible, use request_cowork_directory with path C:\Users\BobbyGallagher\Dropbox\Claude Cowork\Skills to mount it.
Hope that helps.
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