So for your example, yes you might tell the agent "write a fantasy story" and you might have a "storytelling skill" that explains things like charater arcs, tropes, etc. You might have a separate "fiction writing" skill that defines writing styles, editing, consistency, etc.
All of this stuff is just 'prompt management' tooling though and isn't super commplicated. You could just paste the skill content into your context and go from there, this just provides a standardized spec for how to structure these on-demand context blocks.
LLM-powered agents are surprisingly human-like in their errors and misconceptions about less-than-ubiquitous or new tools. Skills are basically just small how-to files, sometimes combined with usage examples, helper scripts etc.
Whenever there's an agent best practice (skill) or 'pre-prompt' that you want to use all the time, turn it into a text expansion snippet so that it works no matter where you are.
As an example, I have a design 'pre-prompt' that dictates a bunch of steering for agents re: how to pick style components, typography, layout, etc. It's a few paragraphs long and I always send it alongside requests for design implementation to get way-better-than-average output.
I could turn it into a skill, but then I'd have to make sure whatever I'm using supported skills -- and install it every time or in a way that was universally seen on my system (no, symlinking doesn't really solve this).
So I use AutoHotkey (you might use Raycast, Espanso, etc) to config that every time I type '/dsn', it auto-expands into my pre-prompt snippet.
Now, no matter whether I'm using an agent on the web/cloud, in my terminal window, or in an IDE, I've memorized my most important 'pre-prompts' and they're a few seconds away.
It's anti-fragile steering by design. Call it universal skill injection.
I liked that idea to have something more CLI agnostic
I have been trying to build skills to do various things on our internal tools, and more often then not, when it doesn't work, it is as much a problem with _our tools_ as it is with the LLM. You can't do obvious things, the documentation sucks, api's return opaque error messages. These are problems that humans can work around because of tribal knowledge, but LLMs absolutely cannot, and fixing it for LLM's also improves it for your human users, who probably have been quietly dealing with friction and bullshit without complaining -- or not dealing with it and going elsewhere.
If you are building a product today, the feature you are working on _is not done_ until Claude Code can use it. A skill and an MCP isn't a "nice to have", it is going to be as important as SEO and accessibility, with extremely similar work to do to enable it.
Your product might as well not exist in a few years if it isn't discoverable by agents and usable by agents.
This is an interesting take. I admit I've never thought this way.
You can have the perfect scraping skill, but if the target blocks your requests, you're stuck. The hard problems are downstream.
Neo: Ju jitsu? I'm gonna learn Ju jitsu.
[Tank winks and loads the program] Neo: Holy shit!