Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?

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

#331

Post by verdverm » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 4:15 PM UTC

woud420 wrote: post #330

verdverm wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do that, but keep the scripts in the code and just tell them in the markdown where the scripts are, same with "references" (docs/) for us. It never made sense to me to put those in a skill dir, many are useful across skills and for humans (many written for humans before agents were a thing) One of the more interesting benefits to skills is that many harnesses now run the inline command(s) in backticks, shortcuttin…

+1 on all of this, it is similar to the pattern I see emerging as well. For example I have open-sourced (let's be honest, it's just my personal tooling of taste) a repo on gh to try and formalize these things. I'd rather not share out of mostly imposter syndrome but essentially it's a scaffolding tool ala "create-react-app" for the stack I generally use. Part of that is to create standardized "docs/{architecture, dec…

I was solving your problem.before LLMs with my personal developers Swiss army knife (hof gen/CUE+templates). I'm somewhat keen to see how I can capture the agent markdown I want in many places, like project init, in CUE via embed and modules I can import and version, skipping the need for a markdown dependency cycle management system.

https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof

(sharing because it has sloppy parts and that/I.S. shouldn't stop you from sharing!)

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

#332

Post by alexsmirnov » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 4:45 PM UTC

mstr32 wrote: post #245

xpnsec wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where they are very useful is as a documentation source for LLMs. For example, I work in infosec and often have to reference DSLs (Cobalt Strike aggressor script for example). Having a skill which is an offline index to carved up function docs, which an LLM can use without having to think, then search for, then download huge 1 page documents with all function documentation, and pollute the context… very useful.

Looks like this is a combination of documentation with a skill, right? How do you manage these skills across projects?

I did create special repo that has all skills/agents/scripts and MCP configuration. All agents ( currently 3 in use: claude code, opencode, and pi ) packed in docker container, with artifacts required by project technologies, and task at hand ( planning, code review, documentation management, web design, ... ). Nothing but a small file with list of technologies committed to project.

For evaluation, there is command to record session, repository commit, and observed problems that stored in special database, so each session can be reproduced. Developer commit reports, I do analysis, refine and evaluate system.

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