asked three senior engineers at my company what the practical difference is between hooks, slash commands, and skills in claude code last week. got three different answers. one said hooks are pre/post events, slash commands are user shortcuts, skills are reusable workflows. another said hooks ARE skills now. third said the abstractions overlap so much it doesn’t matter. read the docs. more confused after. here’s what i think the answer is, tell me where i’m wrong:
- hooks fire on events you can’t control (after-tool-use, on-error)
- slash commands fire on user input you fully control (/deploy, /test)
- skills are bundles of prompts + instructions auto-loaded into context based on task type if these three concepts actually map cleanly onto event vs input vs context bundles, why does every claude code dev i talk to give me a different answer. submitted by /u/Fresh-Resolution182
Originally posted by u/Fresh-Resolution182 on r/ClaudeCode
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