Claude Code Emergent Behavior: When Skills Combine

Summary

I ran across something interesting today. Claude can combine skills! You might be thinking, "huh?", here's what I mean. I've been vibe coding like a fiend lately, experimenting and learning the flow. Working on ways to make AI more successful. First thing I built? A tiling window manager for macOS. Because that's obviously the first thing to build when your goal is world domination. For something I didn't write, I was happy with the performance. Not winning any awards, but feels responsive to me. Still, I knew there had to be plenty of room for improvement in that hellscape of a repo. With this in mind, Claude and I colluded on a new optimize-critical-path skill. You can guess what it does. First path? thegrid focus next command. I kicked off the agent and told it to look at this action and do its thing. Claude was all too happy to use this new skill. It started kicking off subagents and tokens were flying across my screen like a scene from a worse, more dystopian version of the Matrix. I noticed it was thrashing and making assumptions about performance. I heard a voice in my head that sounded like Obi-Wan, telling me that we should always measure first. Then I got an idea. Previously I hacked together a debug skill that adds logs and helps trace issues. I thought to myself, can I combine skills? > what is another way we can approach this. Could we combine optimize critical path skill with my oberdebug? ● Good idea - let's use oberdebug's hypothesis-driven approach to find the actual bottleneck: /oberdebug ● Combining the two approaches. Following oberdebug's structure: Step 1: Issue Statement Symptom: Focus operation takes ~130ms, target is <80ms Component: IPC path (CLI -> Server -> Response) Evidence so far: - Border pooling works (100% hit rate) ✓ - dump alone takes ~82ms (~63ms overhead beyond baseline IPC) - JSON serialization is only ~1ms - NOT the bottleneck - Something else in the IPC round-trip is slow Step 2: Reproduction YES - Easily reproducible with `t...