Tip: 'Skill Teaches the How, Hook Enforces the Rule, Subagent Isolates the Work'

Anthropic·medium signal

Anthropic's steering guidance codifies a decision rule for production Claude Code setups: use a Skill to teach a workflow, a Hook to deterministically enforce a constraint, and a Subagent to isolate work off the lead agent's context — and use all three together, not interchangeably. It's a clean heuristic for deciding which mechanism a given requirement belongs to. Reaching for a skill when you needed a hook (or vice versa) is the common mistake.