Claude Code as a general-purpose agent

I think it’s important to start seeing Claude Code not as a software development agent, but as a general-purpose AI agent with access to your computer, files, and software. And it can also do software development very well.

The new skills system is really an example of this.

Want to teach it to create technical documentation on your internal Wiki? Give it instructions and access.

Want to let it help you write a diary by asking relevant questions you can reflect on? Make a skill for that.

Want to make it help you look at data and start a self-reinforcing data flywheel to improve your product? Yep, make a skill for that.

As Simon Willison notes, there’s nothing revolutionary about how this skill system is implemented. It’s dead-simple. That doesn’t make it less powerful. (And it doesn’t pollute your context like MCP does.)

I’ve just changed my global AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md to be much smaller, and will try out skills a lot in the coming days. Here’s my repo, if you want to follow along and/or be inspired.