You'll noticeTier: how much it should matter to you
2Useful: my rating, 1 to 5
2Signal: worth watching, 1 to 5
ElsewhereArea: what it touches
ImprovementsKind: in v2.1.284,
ImprovementsSection of the release
Unclear Whether the skill-proposing tool itself is only available to some accounts is not stated.
What
A skill is a named set of instructions Claude can call on, stored in a SKILL.md file. Claude can propose new skills or improvements to existing ones. The rule that Claude must read a skill before replacing it used to cover only improvements aimed at a named skill.
It now also covers new proposals that share a name with one of your own skills, or with a skill whose owner is unknown. Such a proposal is refused unless Claude has read that skill's SKILL.md in full and the file has not changed since. Names count as the same even with a leading slash, an anthropic-skills: or claude-ai: prefix, or small differences in characters and hyphens.
The check also runs again at the moment the proposal is made. If a lookup fails, the proposal is no longer let through.
Why
Claude can no longer quietly overwrite one of your existing skills by proposing a "new" one with the same name, since saving it would replace the old SKILL.md entirely.
How sure we are
Something disagreesSomething we can check disagrees with this entry, or the writer said they could not settle it.
The writer flagged doubtWhether the skill-proposing tool itself is only available to some accounts is not stated.
