Why isolation matters
Skills solve the knowledge problem — getting the right instructions to Claude at the right time. But they do not solve the context problem. When a skill loads, its content enters your current conversation. When Claude follows that skill and reads 30 files, writes analysis, and produces a report, all of that output lives in your conversation too.
For quick tasks, this is fine. For heavy tasks — comprehensive code reviews, codebase exploration, test generation, documentation audits — it is a disaster. Your context window fills with intermediate work product, and by the time the task is done, Claude has forgotten what you were working on before you asked it to review that PR.
Agents solve this. An agent is a separate Claude instance with its own context window, its own system prompt, its own tools, and optionally its own copy of the repository. When you delegate a task to an agent, it works in complete isolation. Your main conversation sees only the final result.
The mental model: an agent is a chef. You give them a brief, they go into their own kitchen, use their own tools, make their own decisions, and bring back a finished dish. You do not stand in their kitchen. You do not lend them yours.
