← Tech Brew Ride Home
Tech Brew Ride Home
Skills For Claude As A New AI Paradigm?
00:19:58
Do Skills for Claude represent a new sort of user paradigm for AI? Battlefield 6 seems to be doing what EA needs it to do. Nintendo seems to be killing it. Is Wikipedia in trouble because it’s losing human users? Now Uber drivers can earn new money thanks to AI. And, of course, the Weekend Longreads Suggestions.
Loading summary
Transcript4 lines
- [00:01]
A
This episode is brought to you by Battlefield 6. Battlefield 6 is the ultimate all out warfare experience. Rip through the skies in aerial dogfights, demolish your surroundings for a strategic advantage, harness complete control over every action and movement using the Kinesthetic combat system. Drop into multiplayer with your squad or fight furiously as a member of the Dagger 13 squad in a gritty, adrenaline fueled single player campaign where you'll defend a world on the edge of collapse.
- [00:35]
B
Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride home for Friday, October 17, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today do skills for Claude represent a new sort of user paradigm for AI? Battlefield 6 seems to be doing what EA needed it to do. Nintendo seems to be killing it. Is Wikipedia in trouble because it's losing human users now? Uber drivers can earn new money thanks to AI and of course, the weekend long Read Suggestions here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Anthropic yesterday announced Skills for Claude, a tool with folders of instructions, scripts and resources that Claude can load to improve performance on some tasks. Quoting the Verge Essentially, the feature is designed to improve Claude's AI agent capabilities for your work, specifically so you don't have to spend as much time writing the perfect prompt or referring to past context every time you're trying to accomplish a task. It's available to Pro Max, team and enterprise users. Brad Abrams, a product lead at Anthropic, told the Verge that the thing that's interesting to me about Skills is basically about agents. He said that Skills is a feature essentially to provide organizations building agents a way to teach Claude to do a good job in their specific context. He emphasized that it's not about meeting arbitrary benchmarks, it's about being able to do the task you need at your own company using an Anthropic layer on top of Claude's PowerPoint skill. I had Claude create me a presentation about how Haiku 4.5 is doing in the market, abrams said, adding that Claude created well formatted slides that are easy to digest. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and others have been working toward the goal of actually useful AI agents for years, with executives regularly bringing up Agentic AI on earnings calls and redirecting internal resources toward building the tools. To date, though, progress has been largely incremental, with companies fighting to release new feature updates or iterations of agents. Think of Anthropic's computer use or OpenAI's operator, then Deep Research and then ChatGPT agent, which essentially combine the two. Anthropic's news also follows an OpenAI announcement in the same realm earlier this month at the company's annual Dev Day event. At that event, OpenAI unveiled agent kit, a group of tools executives said were designed to help you take agents from prototype to production and targeted both big companies and individual developers. The example use case OpenAI demonstrated was Albertsons, which runs more than 2,000 US grocery stores, using a custom agent with custom data to create a plan to improve ice cream sales if they were down more than 30%. Box Canva, Evernote and Ramp were also mentioned as having tried the tool. OpenAI also announced a consumer facing tool that allows people to work with apps inside ChatGPT like Zillow and Uber Eats. End quote Friend of the Pod Simon Willison says skills for Claude, which are conceptually very simple may become a bigger deal than people realize, and probably a bigger deal than mcp, whose high token usage is its most significant limitation. Quoting Simon Skills are conceptually extremely simple. A skill is a markdown file telling the model how to do something optionally accompanied by extra documents and pre written scripts that the model can run to help it accomplish the task described by the skills. There's one extra detail that makes this a feature, not just a bunch of files on disk. At the start of a session, Claude's various harnesses can scan all available skill files and read a short explanation for each one from the front matter YAML in the markdown file. This is very token efficient. Each skill only takes up a few dozen extra tokens with the full details only loaded in should the user request a task that the skill can help solve. Just thinking about this with my data journalism hat on a map. Imagine a folder full of skills that covers tasks like the where to get US Census data from and how to understand its structure. How to load data from different formats into SQLite or DuckDB using appropriate Python libraries. How to publish data online as Parquet files in S3 or pushed as tables to dataset Cloud A skill defined by an experienced data reporter talking about how best to find the interesting stories in the new set of data. A skill that describes how to build clean, readable data visualizations using D3. Congratulations. You just built a data journalism agent that can discover and help publish stories against fresh drops in U.S. census data. And you did it with a folder full of markdown files and maybe a couple of example Python scripts. Claude code is, with hindsight, poorly named. It's not purely a coding tool, it's a tool for general computer automation. Anything you can achieve by typing commands into a computer is something that can now be automated by Claude code. It's best described as a general agent Skills make this a whole lot more obvious and explicit. I find the potential applications of this trick somewhat dizzying. Skills are marked down with a tiny bit of YAML metadata and some optional scripts in whatever you can make executable in the environment. They feel a lot closer to the spirit of LLMs. Throw in some text and let the model figure it out. They outsource the hard parts to the LLM harness and the associated computer environment. Given everything we have learned about LLM's ability to run tools over the last couple of years, I think that's a very sensible strategy. I expect we'll see a Cambrian Explorer explosion in skills which will make this year's MCP rush look pedestrian by comparison. Remember last week we talked in the longreads about Battlefield 6 being a big release for EA and a big release for gaming generally? Well, apparently it's gone well because Battlefield 6 has reportedly sold 7 million copies already, becoming the biggest launch in the franchise's history and further proof from Steam that this has been a great success. Quoting Tweaktown A few days ago, Valve's Steam broke its CCU concurrent user record with 41.6 million PC gamers. This impressive figure represents a staggering 10 million more users than the concurrent user records from 2022 and 2023. Serving as a reminder, the global PC gaming market continues to grow and expand, with Steam leading the charge. This figure isn't a surge or anomaly as tens of millions of PC gamers log into Steam every day or keep their PCs. However, with this new CCU milestone recorded on October 12, many are attributing it to the recent string of popular PC game releases, namely Battlefield 6 and Hollow Knight Silksong. That, along with the latest Steam Next Fest, which offers gamers a bunch of demos of unreleased titles to play. That said, free to play titles like Counter Strike 2, Dota 2 and PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds continue to be the most played games on the platform. As of this writing, Battlefield 6 is sitting in third place as the most played game on Steam, with games Bannon, Bongo Cat Delta Force, Marvel Rivals and Warframe rounding out the top 10. You know who else has been doing well in gaming? Nintendo. Quoting Bloomberg Nintendo has asked suppliers to produce as many as 25 million units of the Switch 2 console by the end of March 2026, setting the company up for record first year sales of a console that's already reached high water marks for the global gaming sector. The Japanese company is asking its manufacturing partners to ramp up output, counting on demand to persist over the coming holidays and into the new year, according to people familiar with the matter. Nintendo, which began assembly of the switch the second of around the end of calendar 2024, may still adjust the final production figures when it gets a clearer reading of demand during the critical holiday shopping season. As of now, Nintendo is likely to comfortably surpass analyst estimates for sales of 17.6 million devices in the fiscal year ending March, let alone its own much lower public forecast, the people said, asking not to be named. Discussing private plans Nintendo can be expected to sell roughly 20 million units of the Switch 2 this fiscal year, based on shipping estimates from its assembly partners with any leftover consoles in inventory for the next fiscal year. Shares in the Kyoto based company have risen more than 50% over the past year, buoyed by record setting early sales of the new hardware. Investors have cooled in recent weeks after successive new highs, but the company is still projected to report 68% growth in quarterly revenue when it unveils earnings next month. Many analysts expect it to upgrade its annual forecast then, including for the switch 2. End quote.
- [09:23]
C
When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn more@WhatsApp.com.
- [09:50]
B
We've all been there. Too many SaaS tools, not enough visibility at all, and way too much access for you to keep track of. It's the stuff security nightmares are made of. That's where Trelica by1Password comes in. They inventory every app your company uses and create app profiles to help you easily assess risks, manage access, and make sure your password security is locked down tight. With 1Password's extended access management, you can control your company's many, many SaaS tools, securely onboard and offboard your people, and actually hit your compliance goals. I've been telling you about 1Password Extended Access Management all year and now Trelica comes along to make things even better. Sleep Easy with Trelica by 1Password Learn more at 1Password.com ride. That's 1Password.com ride when your data goes dark, Veeam turns the lights back on. Partner with Veeam to increase your data resilience and get the right data recovery options for any kind of disruption so you can undo the unpredictable and get your data back so fast you won't even have time to miss it. With Veeam, it's all good. Keep your business running@veeam.com Wikimedia says Wikipedia is seeing a significant decline in human traffic as more people access the site's information via AI chatbots without clicking through quoting 404 media, the Wikimedia foundation said that this poses a risk to the long term sustainability of Wikipedia. We welcome new ways for people to gain knowledge, however, AI chatbots, search engines and social platforms that use Wikipedia content must encourage more visitors to Wikipedia so that the free knowledge that so many people and platforms depend on can continue to flow sustainably, the foundation's senior director of Product Marshall Miller said in a blog post. With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work. Ironically, while generative AI and search engines are causing a decline in direct traffic to Wikipedia, its data is more valuable to them than ever. Wikipedia articles are some of the most common training data for AI models, and Google and other platforms have for years mined Wikipedia articles to power its snippets and knowledge panels, which siphon traffic away from Wikipedia itself. Almost all large language models train on Wikipedia datasets, and search engines and social media platforms prioritize its information to respond to questions from their users, Miller said. That means that people are reading the knowledge created by Wikipedia volunteers all over the Internet, even if they don't visit Wikipedia.org. this human created knowledge has become even more important to the spread of reliable information online. End quote. Miller said that in May 2025 Wikipedia noticed unusually high amounts of apparently human traffic originating mostly from Brazil. He didn't go into details, but explained this caused the foundation to update its bot detection systems. After making this revision, we are seeing declines in human page views on Wikipedia over the past few months, amounting to a decrease of roughly 8% as compared to the same months in 2024, he said. We believe that these declines reflect the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information, especially with search engines providing answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content. Now actually, I have a bit more information on this myself because earlier this month I interviewed Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales himself. The interview is embargoed until his book comes out later this month, which is why you haven't heard that interview yet. But I did ask Jimmy about this very thing, twice in fact, and both times he said that Wikipedia had not yet seen a drop in human visitors, so make of that what you will. Maybe the numbers reported in this piece hadn't come in yet. Uber drivers have a new way to make money, and guess what? It's down to AI. Quoting Bloomberg Uber is giving some drivers in the US the option to earn money by completing tasks related to the company's nascent data labeling business, an area where the rideshare giant sees an opportunity to shine in the artificial intelligence boom. A new job category called digital tasks will appear in the Uber driver app for some workers later this fall, offering existing registered drivers the opportunity to make a few bucks if they take on simple assignments that can be completed within minutes, according to the company. Those stints currently include uploading documents like restaurant menus or recording audio samples of themselves, narrating a scenario in various languages, said Chief Product Officer Sanchin Kansal. More tasks will be added over time, he said, and the payout will vary based on the time commitment of each assignment. Uber is seeking to ride the wave of a growing appetite for bespoke data sets and labeling services that require human vetting to train AI models. Scale AI, which offers similar services, received more than $14 billion in investment from Meta earlier this year and is valued at more than $29 billion. The rideshare company's data services business, Uber AI Solutions, has been pitching itself to other enterprises, inviting them to outsource some AI development to independent contractors. Late last year, it launched a web based platform to recruit talent in more than 20 countries for new types of gigs like coding and translation. End quote and this morning, Apple and Formula One announced a five year US media rights deal for all Formula One races starting in 2026. Sources say Apple is paying $140 million per year for the rights, up from ESPN's around $85 million per year. Quoting CNBC Apple TV will provide coverage of all Formula One events, including practice, qualifying and sprint sessions, as part of the streamer's existing $12.99 per month subscription, which comes ad free. Certain F1 races and all practice sessions will also be available for free in the Apple TV app throughout the season, the company said in a statement. It's a different structure from Apple's partnership with Major League Soccer. Apple TV, similarly has exclusive rights to every MLS game, but at an extra cost through the MLS season. Pass F1TV Premium, the league's own content offering that's popular with racing fans, will continue to be available in the US but will now require an Apple TV subscription once a customer subscribes to Apple TV. F1TV Premium will be included in their Apple subscription rather than as a standalone offering. In the longreads this week I've got more on offer than I have in recent weeks because I feel bad that I've only been giving you bits and pieces recently. So I've got a bunch to share though. No time to read out a lot of excerpts today. But first up, the Journal takes a look at how AI data centers are building on site power plants to bypass the overloaded electrical grid and meet soaring electricity demand amid permitting and supply challenges. Then Colossus has a deep and I mean deep dive profile of Joshua Kushner and how he turned Thrive Capital into one of the premier VC firms in the world. Another interview I recorded this month, the person talked about meeting Josh when Thrive didn't even have offices yet. You'll hear about that soon as well. Then the Hollywood Reporter has a piece looking at the behind the scenes negotiations between OpenAI and Hollywood around the release of Sora TL Dr. Hollywood isn't happy. The title of the piece is How Sam Altman Played Hollywood. And finally, back to the journal. Well, TiVo has sold its last DVR, but the journal looks at the Die Hards that refuse to let their tivos go quietly into that good night. No bonus episode for you this weekend, but I do have an ask. I keep mentioning these interviews I've been doing the last few weeks and some of them you've already heard, but a lot of them are being banked because at the end of the month I'm relaunching the Internet History Podcast, the thing that got me into podcasting over a decade ago. To begin with, we're starting with that Jimmy Wales interview I mentioned. So my ask is this. When I launch, does anyone listening have a big or long standing Hacker News account? Because when I relaunch, I'd love some of you with good hacker news juice to post the relaunch there. It would help if you're long standing fans of the Internet History podcast. But if this is you and you want to help me out, get in touch over the weekend at Brian at ridehomefund. Com. Talk to you on Monday.