Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
A markdown file is an employee
Turning Work into Files
Any business process can be turned into one. The first attempt will be bad and expensive, with many iterations. What matters is being able to tell the agent very quickly and in very simple ways: fix this, fix that, this was wrong.
The agent's trace and the history of working with you then become a skill file. Every feat of strength turns into a markdown file plus code plus tests that can be reused and put on a cron job, and any later mistake is just a bug fix that stays there forever.
Results at Scale
The loop applies to sales, to marketing, and to customer support, all the way down to everything. There are companies today that go from zero to $15 million in annual recurring revenue in about four months with two or three people and a few hundred skill files.
As the files pile up, provenance matters. When two facts conflict, the more recent one wins, and a cron job sweeping through the files keeps things accurate and from the right places.
How do Claude's skill files work?
A skill is a folder containing a file named SKILL.md, which holds instructions written in markdown, and it can include scripts. Anthropic introduced Agent Skills for Claude in October 2025. The model first sees only each skill's short name and description, and it loads the full instructions when a task matches. That design lets many skills sit available without filling the context window.
Why does markdown suit agent instructions?
Markdown is plain text with light formatting marks, so people and language models can both read it without special software. John Gruber created it in 2004. Because it is text, version control systems like Git can show exactly which line changed between versions. That makes each correction to an instruction visible in a diff.
How does newest-wins settle conflicting facts?
Provenance means recording where a piece of information came from and when it was recorded. Distributed databases often settle conflicting versions with a rule called last write wins, which keeps the entry with the latest timestamp. The rule is simple but can discard a correct older value if clocks drift. Amazon's 2007 Dynamo paper discussed last write wins as one way to reconcile conflicting versions.
More from The a16z Show
