What's this about?
An Anthropic engineer shared a skill people internally use constantly: `/eli5 <thing>`, which asks Claude to explain a topic as if to someone who knows nothing about it, rendered as an HTML page with big pictures and few words. It became the week's most-liked developer tweet at 13,500 likes.
What exactly is a "skill"?
A skill is a small named bundle of instructions you can invoke like a command. The striking thing about this one, as dotey pointed out in his Chinese breakdown, is that it contains essentially one sentence of prompt — you do not really need to install it, you could type the sentence. That is the actual lesson: the value is in having a named, repeatable phrasing, not in any machinery.
What's the community saying?
13,500 likes, plus a prominent dissent
- Overwhelming enthusiasm for the output format — an HTML artifact with large visuals rather than a wall of text.
- dotey's practical note that the skill is one prompt line and is only worth installing if you use it often.
- A substantive counter-argument from Ethan Mollick, given its own item below: explaining to a five-year-old is the wrong default, because the real advantage of these models is personalised explanation rather than generic simplification.