Coding
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Nano Banana Pro
Agent skill for nano-banana-pro
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Coding
Commands, Skills and Agents
generic skill
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Jan 15, 2026
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Anthropic's Claude workflows are built around three concepts: commands, agents, and skills. Here, I take a look at what I think they mean and how I see them fitting together.
A command is Claude’s lowest-latency utility. It’s a single-shot, declarative instruction — like telling it to “fix the tone of this email” or “summarize this document for executives.” Commands don’t involve long memory, deliberation, or self-evolving objective — they’re transactional.
You can think of commands as the equivalent of shell commands but in natural language, stateless, deterministic within human reason, and extremely reliable when the scope is narrow.
Examples:
Agents are not smarter than commands — they’re persistent. They hold a goal over time. They loop, try, adjust. They decide what to do next. They can even call out to tools autonomously.
The key philosophical shift is this: commands do tasks → agents try to achieve outcomes.
That distinction sounds minor, but it’s the difference between a surgeon and a personal trainer. One succeeds instantly or fails. The other keeps showing up and evaluating progress.
Agents are powerful but risky — because autonomy introduces failure modes, ambiguity, and expectation gravity. Anyone who thinks agents replace human supervision is LARPing. The real promise is elastic delegation — you control when to graduate from “do this” to “keep working until you solve this”.
Skills are the building blocks the agent can call on. In Anthropic's world, a skill is something Claude knows how to do — reusable, name-addressable, composable. They're not autonomous, but they're opinionated micro-competencies that higher abstractions, like agents, can orchestrate.
The mistake people make is thinking skills are mini-agents. They aren't. A skill doesn't decide — it executes. Think of it as a public method on Claude's internal class.
Skills also serve a critical architectural purpose: they help manage context and can reduce token usage. By encapsulating specific capabilities as discrete, callable units, agents can invoke exactly what they need without loading irrelevant context. Anthropic's research on context management shows that strategic context editing can reduce token consumption by up to 84% while maintaining workflow completion rates.
In the long view, "skill marketplaces" is the most important idea here. Skills form the economic layer — where organizations will eventually differentiate and trade intelligence like software libraries today.
You graduate upward only when needed.
The big inflection won't come from agents going superhuman — it'll come from skills becoming the new API surface for organizational intelligence. Once that clicks, commands become the UI, agents become the orchestration tier, and skills become the economy.