Forward Deployed, Episode 2: Claude Code Skills and the Progressive Disclosure Problem

Welcome back to episode 2 of Forward Deployed. This week Noah and Lance dive deep into Claude Code skills, a deceptively simple feature that’s changing how we think about building AI agents. Noah walks through the Alephic CLI he’s been building and reveals a wild hook-based routing system using Cerebras at 3,000 tokens per second. Plus: Why Andreessen thinks AI isn’t the Internet redux. Key Topics Covered * Claude Code skills and the progressive disclosure problem * How Noah built a hook to solve the 10% skill hit rate * Tier 1 vs Tier 2 action space: Why Manus and Anthropic converged on the same architecture independently * 3,000 tokens per second: Using Cerebras Llama 120B as an invisible routing layer for every user message * The MCP/skill/command convergence: Are they all just different flavors of the same primitive? * Vision feedback loop: Turning Gemini into a Pentagram creative director to critique Claude’s web designs * Andreessen’s “computers v2” thesis: Why AI isn’t the Internet redux, it’s the first von Neumann architecture replacement in 80 years * Git workflows with Claude Code: Why Lance and Noah don’t worry about merge conflicts anymore Timestamps * 00:11 – Welcome to episode 2 on Claude Code skills * 00:28 – What are Claude Code skills? Not much more than a folder full of prompts * 01:10 – Lance: Skills as “instructing a new hire” with subfolder instructions * 01:25 – Simon Willison and Jesse Vincent’s “superpowers” discovery * 04:45 – Noah demos the Alephic CLI skill directory structure * 07:32 – The hook-based skill search system using Cerebras * 08:19 – Lance reveals: YAML front matter always loads into system prompt * 09:32 – The 10% skill hit rate problem when you have 10+ skills * 10:08 – Cerebras Llama 120B running at 3,000 tokens per second for invisible routing * 13:17 – The universal pattern: Everyone’s trying to control context * 15:59 – Tier 1 vs Tier 2 action space: Manus and Anthropic converge independently * 21:29 – Noah’s big challenge: Getting models to consistently look for skills * 28:04 – Hit rate drops to 10% even with only 4–5 skills * 30:54 – Could progressive disclosure become built-in like chain of thought? * 34:06 – Lance on externalizing context to file systems * 35:15 – Vision feedback loop: Gemini as Pentagram creative director critiquing Claude’s designs * 37:57 – Andreessen: AI isn’t the Internet, it’s computers v2 * 42:08 – Why Noah and Lance don’t worry about merge conflicts anymore Links & References Core References * 📄 Anthropic Engineering Blog on Skills – The engineering blog post Lance mentions about YAML front matter and system prompts * 🎙️ Andrej Karpathy on Dwarkesh Podcast – Discussion on small models and reasoning engines * 🎙️ Andreessen on Cheeky Pint Podcast – “AI is computers v2” thesis: First von Neumann architecture replacement in 80 years * 🎙️ Claude Code Podcast with Boris and Kat – Discussion on dual-use tools Tools & Frameworks * 🔗 Claude Code – Anthropic’s AI coding assistant * 🔗 Jesse Vincent’s Superpowers – Original skills plugin that inspired Noah * 🔗 Manus – Consumer agent with multi-tier action space architecture * 🔗 Cerebras – Llama 120B at 3,000 tokens per second * 🔗 Puppeteer MCP – Browser automation MCP * 🔗 Playwright MCP – Browser automation alternative * 🔗 GitHub CLI – Command line tool Lance loves for PR management Blog Posts * Simon Willison’s Blog – First place Noah saw Claude Code skills coverage * Cloudflare TypeScript Type Definitions Technique – Alternative to classic MCP definitions Companies Mentioned * Anthropic – Claude Code creator * LangChain – Where Lance is a founding engineer * Alephic – Noah’s AI consulting company * Pentagram – Design agency Noah used as creative director persona Development Tools * Obsidian – Note-taking use case for Claude Code * Git Work Trees – How the team manages multi-branch development About the Hosts Noah Brier is co-founder of Alephic, an AI consulting company helping brands build custom AI systems. He writes about AI strategy and implementation. Lance Martin is a founding engineer at LangChain, where he works on developer tools for building AI applications. Connect with the Hosts * Noah Brier: LinkedIn | X/Twitter * Lance Martin: LinkedIn | X/Twitter Subscribe for weekly episodes exploring how AI is actually being deployed in the real world. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.forwarddeployed.com