Understanding Claude Code's Skills and Plugins - What Problems Are They Really Solving?
This article was written on January 19, 2026.
Recently, terms like Skills and Plugins have been trending in AI developer communities. At first, I was confused—aren’t these all about “letting AI call tools”? Why do we need so many concepts?
After examining the code of several Skills, I finally understood what problems each of them is solving.
This article doesn’t focus on definitions. Instead, I want to start from engineering pain points and gradually deduce why we need these things. If you’re also confused by these new terms, I hope this article can help clarify your thoughts.