Anthropic Official Skill Guide: Progressive Disclosure Architecture Loads Only Relevant Skill Content (87K Star Repo)

Towards Data Science·medium signal

Anthropic's January 2026 33-page guide formalizes Claude skills as a three-stage progressive disclosure system: metadata (~100 tokens, name + description) is always loaded; Claude decides whether to load the full skill based only on metadata; full content loads on demand. This means skill libraries scale without token cost—Claude reads metadata for all skills but pays full cost only for relevant ones. anthropics/skills repo reached 87K GitHub stars by March 2026.