I was poking around in Claude’s configuration menus and noticed this:
Well, well, well. Claude really does have a skill for generative art. Here’s a quick quote from the skill’s markdown:
Creating algorithmic art using p5.js with seeded randomness and interactive parameter exploration. Use this when users request creating art using code, generative art, algorithmic art, flow fields, or particle systems. Create original algorithmic art rather than copying existing artists’ work to avoid copyright violations.
A skill for Claude extends the system sort of like MCP and tools but with less code:
Claude can now use Skills to improve how it performs specific tasks. Skills are folders that include instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude can load when needed.
Claude will only access a skill when it’s relevant to the task at hand. When used, skills make Claude better at specialized tasks like working with Excel or following your organization’s brand guidelines.
The Anthropic engineering blog has a deeper dive into the overall design and intent of skills:
Building a skill for an agent is like putting together an onboarding guide for a new hire. Instead of building fragmented, custom-designed agents for each use case, anyone can now specialize their agents with composable capabilities by capturing and sharing their procedural knowledge. In this article, we explain what Skills are, show how they work, and share best practices for building your own.
And if that isn’t enough for you, Simon Willison jumps in with his trademark enthusiasm, Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
The algorithmic-artskill relies on p5.js to implement requested pieces. This
makes sense given Claude Code’s TypeScript foundation. What’s crazy to
me is that the Skills mechanism adds the entirety of that previously
linked markdown to the LLM context if the skill is needed. That’s a
lot of tokens consumed! On the flip side, it’s a tremendous example of
actual prompting for generative art in the wild.
Just more motivation to pursue new dreams of agentic generative art using Python. Oft attributed to Picasso, “good artists copy, great artists steal.” I might not be either, but I’ll definitely be examining that skill for inspiration.