2 posts tagged with "Skills"

November 2025 saw Anthropic move the Claude family from “helpful chatbot” to “agentic co-worker”.
Below are the three headline moves you may have missed while you were wrapping up Q4.

1. “Extreme Reasoning” drops – Opus 4 & Sonnet 4 think longer, code better​

• What changed

  • Claude Opus 4 becomes Anthropic’s flagship coding model, built for multi-hour agent loops.
  • Claude Sonnet 4 gets a 2 × speed-up plus higher instruction-fidelity.
  • Both models ship in two modes:
    1. Fast (sub-second)
    2. Extended-thinking (up to 5 min), letting the model search, test and debug its own outputs.

• Why it matters
  Internal benchmarks show a 42 % jump on SWE-bench (real GitHub issues) vs. 3.5-Sonnet, with pass@1 above 70 % when the agent is allowed to iterate.
  Early adopters report 7-hour autonomous coding sessions that complete full feature branches without human hand-off [^14^].

• How to try

  • Available today on claude.ai (Max/Team/Enterprise) and the Anthropic API.
  • Toggle “Extended thinking” in the UI or set thinking_budget_tokens in the API.

2. “Skills” GA – turn Claude into your company’s mini-employee​

• What it is
  Skills are portable folders that bundle instructions, Python/R scripts, brand guidelines, SQL queries—anything Claude needs to repeat a workflow.
  Think “Excel macro” meets “GPT”, but version-controlled and shareable across seats.

• Ships with 20 pre-builds

  • “Quarterly-earnings parser” (pulls tables from PDFs, writes CEO summary)
  • “Canva brand-guard” (auto-crops to template, exports 4 sizes)
  • “Jira→Slack sprint digest”

• Who gets it
  Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans. API & Agent SDK support landed Nov-18 [^3^].

3. Computer-Use graduates from beta – Claude now drives your desktop​

Originally teased in October, the 3.5-model that can see pixels, move the cursor and type is now production-grade.

• New in November

  • Multi-app workflows (e.g., pull data from Snowflake, paste chart into Google Slides, export PDF).
  • Vision accuracy ↑ 18 % on OSWorld leaderboard.
  • SOC-2 Type II compliance ⇒ approved for regulated industries [^15^].

• Pricing
  $0.60 / successful task (success = user clicks “Approve”). Free tier gets 25 tasks/month until Jan-2026 promo ends.

Quick hits you might have scrolled past​

• Web-search leaves beta – now on every paid tier, citations auto-inserted [^5^][^12^].
• 1-hour prompt-cache – keep a 1 M-token context hot for <$0.20, perfect for book-length docs [^14^].
• GitHub Actions for Claude Code – run nightly test-fix loops without a server [^14^].

Looking ahead​

Anthropic’s roadmap slide (leaked Nov-29) hints at:

• Memory v2 – cross-conversation recall for individual free users (Dec).
• Claude 4 Haiku – 200 Hz, sub-$0.10 / 1 K tokens, aimed at embedded devices (Q1-26).
• European region – GDPR-compliant endpoints in Ireland (Feb-26).

Bottom line​

November 2025 marks the moment Claude stopped asking you for perfect prompts and started bringing its own toolkit to work.
If you haven’t given Extended-thinking or Skills a spin, schedule a 30-minute sandbox before year-end—your 2026 self will thank you.

Happy building!

Anthropic has officially launched Claude Skills, a groundbreaking feature that allows Claude to improve how it performs specific tasks by loading specialized folders containing instructions, scripts, and resources. Available across Claude apps, Claude Code, and API, Skills bring a new level of customization and portability to AI-powered workflows.