Claude skills and hooks

Claude skills and hooks enable developers to connect Anthropic models to external APIs, functions, and data sources for autonomous task execution.

This framework (often categorized under Tool Use or Function Calling) allows Claude 3.5 Sonnet and other models to interact with your specific codebase. By defining a structured JSON schema, you provide the model with a library of capabilities: searching a Postgres database, triggering a Slack notification, or calculating real-time shipping rates. The model analyzes the user prompt, determines which hook to trigger, and outputs a structured request for your application to execute. This turns a static chat interface into an active agent capable of manipulating live environments with precision.

https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/tool-use