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Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?

#291

Post by c0n5pir4cy »

devolving-dev wrote: post #277

Like you said, I think skills are quickly subsumed by model abilities. I leave relevant notes about my own projects in agents.md and local comments around tricky bits of code that need them, but otherwise I just use vanilla codex.

I think a lot of people are missing some of the advantages of skills - they're to give an agent/harness the knowledge of how to do something or more context without it always being part of the prompt.

This could be to try and expand the capabilities of the model but in it can be used to store personal preference/workflow/organisational knowledge/improved efficiency etc. The harness could work through and build some of this on its own - but it's much more efficient if it has a document it can just look up. I use them for the database structure and it's quirks, how to use branded document templates, external document tone, system workflows, compliance requirements etc.

I wouldn't want these to load every time but being able to call them is really useful.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?

#292

Post by jurgenburgen »

well_ackshually wrote: post #217
jurgenburgen wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you have a debugging skill? Just tell it to read the docs. Skills are for packaging instructions for how to interact with your organizations homebrew process and tools. By definition skills shouldn’t be useful outside of your org because they’re just docs and third party tools already have them for humans.

Anthropic must love you. Re-blow hundred of thousands of tokens to relearn how to use your profiler and build system at every debugging attempt.

Can you elaborate why a debugging skill would save those tokens?

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?

#293

Post by imadtaieber »

mrbonner wrote: post #263

There is a very similar connection in the relation of skills/mcp/… and everything related to a prompt: they are all just a special-purposed prompt named differently. In a way, it reminds me of the concept in OOO: we give lots of names to “design patterns”, even write books about it. But in the end, they’re all based on polymorphism. Know this fundamental and I feel less overwhelmed.

Can you explain more?

by the way Alan kay was right, tech is pop culture. We keep re-naming things.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?

#294

Post by imadtaieber »

SyneRyder wrote: post #7
imadtaieber wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I meant by skills getting eating by models are the "general use" skills, like design critique, code review...ect But, for custom use skills, ofc no model will be able to replace them and it's not efficient to try to do that as well. For this type of skills I create and maintain them by myself, my question was about "general use" skills, they are everywhere on the internet, how do you manage them?

Do you find any of the general use skills useful? I'm not sure I've ever used any of them, and when I've looked at them it's been some YouTuber trying to make money. That, and their Substack. I know everyone's down on MCP, but custom-built client side MCP tools are what I find useful instead. But that's me.

Honestly Im not able to verify, I just throw things at the model and iterate with it. The most useful skills are the ones that I create

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?

#295

Post by sundarurfriend »

mlmonkey wrote: post #283
estearum wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you confused by? You're saying the same thing they said. They added the additional claim that writing the skills down (apparently) prevents the models from having to self-prompt on the fly and therefore reduces token consumption.

I think skills also count towards the token counts. In the end, everything becomes a 1-D array of input text.

Their claim is not about the prompt or skill tokens, it's about output tokens - skills can help the model bypass some thinking tokens or avoid reasoning deadends, and that way reduce output token usage. That's what they seem to have found empirically from their testing. (If it's truly 2x-4x, the time savings in waiting for the output is a pretty nice benefit too.)

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?

#298

Post by dataplumb3r »

I blocklist all of them.

I allowlist one going over our issue management system, and a few around internal processes I believe have value (basically very short pointers at OpenAPI specs for making HTTP reqs - could probably be in the repo AGENTS.md but w/e).

When opening a new repo I'll look if any skills look like they actually give helpful context and aren't Claude vomiting out a torrent of text (over)fitting some insanely specific use case and allowlist those.

Or give up after too much exposure to vile AI created text.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?

#299

Post by cindyllm »

dataplumb3r wrote: post #298

I blocklist all of them. I allowlist one going over our issue management system, and a few around internal processes I believe have value (basically very short pointers at OpenAPI specs for making HTTP reqs - could probably be in the repo AGENTS.md but w/e). When opening a new repo I'll look if any skills look like they actually give helpful context and aren't Claude vomiting out a torrent of text (over)fitting some…

[dead]

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?

#300

Post by wwei7 »

avaer wrote: post #105

Skills are mostly snake oil, the way people use them (the aspiration to download kung foo from a celebrity). There was a time when maybe it mattered (last year), but with good repos and good prompts today's agents can find exactly what they need without any skills. "Skills" as developer macros can be useful, but at most those are things shared with the team (in the repo), not something you download from the internet.…

Agree. Good file management will be if not is already good enough.
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