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Claude Code skills let you extend a coding agent with custom workflows, specialist knowledge, and automation. You write a SKILL.md file with instructions, and the agent follows them. At least, that’s the idea. In practice, Claude treats skill content as advice, not as instructions. A skill that says “always use spec-kit to create the specification” might get followed, or Claude might decide it already has enough context from the brainstorming phase to write the spec directly. It’s being helpful, but it’s also wrong. This post describes patterns for dealing with that challenge, from scripts that enforce consistency to hooks that block shortcuts before they happen.

The last post on this blog was about Jib, Google’s daemonless Java image builder. That was July 2018. Almost eight years ago. Anybody remember when that was the latest hotness? Before that, I wrote about Docker when Docker was still exciting and built a Kubernetes cluster on Raspberry Pi 3 nodes when that was still a weekend adventure. I spent way many words on Jolokia and JMX. 27 posts between 2010 and 2018, then silence. If you’ve been reading tech blogs long enough, you know how that goes. So what breaks eight years of silence?