Skills as 'Instructing a New Hire'

Welcome back to episode 2 of Forward Deployed. This week Noah and Lance dive deep into Claude Code skills, a deceptively simple feature that’s changing how we think about building AI agents. Noah walks through the Alephic CLI he’s been building and reveals a wild hook-based routing system using Cerebras at 3,000 tokens per second.

Plus: Why Andreessen thinks AI isn’t the Internet redux.

Key Topics Covered

* Claude Code skills and the progressive disclosure problem

* How Noah built a hook to solve the 10% skill hit rate

* Tier 1 vs Tier 2 action space: Why Manus and Anthropic converged on the same architecture independently

* 3,000 tokens per second: Using Cerebras Llama 120B as an invisible routing layer for every user message

* The MCP/skill/command convergence: Are they all just different flavors of the same primitive?

* Vision feedback loop: Turning Gemini into a Pentagram creative director to critique Claude’s web designs

* Andreessen’s “computers v2” thesis: Why AI isn’t the Internet redux, it’s the first von Neumann architecture replacement in 80 years

* Git workflows with Claude Code: Why Lance and Noah don’t worry about merge conflicts anymore

Timestamps

* 00:11 – Welcome to episode 2 on Claude Code skills

* 00:28 – What are Claude Code skills? Not much more than a folder full of prompts

* 01:10 – Lance: Skills as “instructing a new hire” with subfolder instructions

* 01:25 – Simon Willison and Jesse Vincent’s “superpowers” discovery

* 04:45 – Noah demos the Alephic CLI skill directory structure

* 07:32 – The hook-based skill search system using Cerebras

* 08:19 – Lance reveals: YAML front matter always loads into system prompt

* 09:32 – The 10% skill hit rate problem when you have 10+ skills

* 10:08 – Cerebras Llama 120B running at 3,000 tokens per second for invisible routing

* 13:17 – The universal pattern: Everyone’s trying to control context

* 15:59 – Tier 1 vs Tier 2 action space: Manus and Anthropic converge independently

* 21:29 – Noah’s big challenge: Getting models to consistently look for skills

* 28:04 – Hit rate drops to 10% even with only 4–5 skills

* 30:54 – Could progressive disclosure become built-in like chain of thought?

* 34:06 – Lance on externalizing context to file systems

* 35:15 – Vision feedback loop: Gemini as Pentagram creative director critiquing Claude’s designs

* 37:57 – Andreessen: AI isn’t the Internet, it’s computers v2

* 42:08 – Why Noah and Lance don’t worry about merge conflicts anymore

Links & References

Core References

* 📄 Anthropic Engineering Blog on Skills – The engineering blog post Lance mentions about YAML front matter and system prompts

* 🎙️ Andrej Karpathy on Dwarkesh Podcast – Discussion on small models and reasoning engines

* 🎙️ Andreessen on Cheeky Pint Podcast – “AI is computers v2” thesis: First von Neumann architecture replacement in 80 years

* 🎙️ Claude Code Podcast with Boris and Kat – Discussion on dual-use tools

Tools & Frameworks

* 🔗 Claude Code – Anthropic’s AI coding assistant

* 🔗 Jesse Vincent’s Superpowers – Original skills plugin that inspired Noah

* 🔗 Manus – Consumer agent with multi-tier action space architecture

* 🔗 Cerebras – Llama 120B at 3,000 tokens per second

* 🔗 Puppeteer MCP – Browser automation MCP

* 🔗 Playwright MCP – Browser automation alternative

* 🔗 GitHub CLI – Command line tool Lance loves for PR management

Blog Posts

* Simon Willison’s Blog – First place Noah saw Claude Code skills coverage

* Cloudflare TypeScript Type Definitions Technique – Alternative to classic MCP definitions

Companies Mentioned

* Anthropic – Claude Code creator

* LangChain – Where Lance is a founding engineer

* Alephic – Noah’s AI consulting company

* Pentagram – Design agency Noah used as creative director persona

Development Tools

* Obsidian – Note-taking use case for Claude Code

* Git Work Trees – How the team manages multi-branch development

About the Hosts

Noah Brier is co-founder of Alephic, an AI consulting company helping brands build custom AI systems. He writes about AI strategy and implementation.

Lance Martin is a founding engineer at LangChain, where he works on developer tools for building AI applications.

Connect with the Hosts

* Noah Brier: LinkedIn | X/Twitter

* Lance Martin: LinkedIn | X/Twitter

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