What problem does it solve?
This Skill helps you design and implement Claude (Anthropic) API integrations that work correctly across common surfaces (single-call, streaming, tool use, and managed agents) while enforcing best practices like provider consistency, prompt caching, and robust tool-result handling.
Core Features & Use Cases
- Claude API app construction: Guides how to call
POST /v1/messages correctly and choose the right request surface for your workflow.
- Streaming & UI-ready output: Provides streaming handling guidance for long responses and real-time interfaces.
- Tool use & agentic loops: Covers function calling patterns, tool runner vs manual loops, and safe continuation logic.
- Prompt caching optimization: Teaches prefix-stability rules, cache breakpoint placement, and how to verify cache hits.
- Extended thinking & effort control: Recommends adaptive thinking for Claude 4.6 and explains effort tuning.
- Managed Agents (beta) workflows: Explains the agent → session flow, event streaming/steering, and integration constraints.
Quick Start
Use the claude-api skill when you want to add Claude API support to an app by using the official Anthropic SDK for your language, enabling prompt caching where appropriate, and implementing tool-use handling (streaming and tool-result round-trips) if your feature requires function calls.