Show HN: Skillscript – A declarative, sandboxed language for tool orchestration

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Thanks. I'm guessing since the docs are mintlify hosted, the CDN assets might be being blocked. I'll look and see if adding a domain sidesteps it.

Is what you are seeing is the topics sidebar overlapping the text?

Generating but not programming in them. They need to be reminded of the complete language definition they generated in every prompt, which is extremely costly, inefficient, and ultimately pointless, since any language you make up can't hold a candle to Python and its ecosystem, because it doesn't have an ecosystem, and the language itself doesn't exist in the training data.

How can you not get that? Do you believe LLMs remember what you show them between calls? That's not how they work. Each call starts from a clean slate, you have to re-describe the new language each and every call. There's no way to get around that. They are not magic. They do not learn from your prompts, which have absolutely no effect on the model itself.

If you think they do, you are falling for an illusion. ChatGPT is appending each of your incremental prompts to the full prompt, and it grows and grows longer and longer every time you add something. Sure, it summarizes when the full prompt gets to long, but that makes it distort and forget your language definition, and you have to add it again. If you give it the prompt to generate the language from scratch each time instead of the generated language itself, it generates a different language every time. You can't "cleverly hack" or "wish" your way out of that.

They may be good at generating new languages, but one thing that LLMs aren't good at apparently is warning you it's futile to generate a new language intended for llms to program instead of just using existing languages. They just play along and do ridiculous useless things out of syncophancy.

I really appreciate the comments and the encouragement.

"How this better than just using any other script language?"

I wanted to make the language something built for a machine to write and a human to approve with a narrow scope and my control of what extends that. What shell commands, if any. What MCP and what tools in that MCP, and so on. If an agent generates a Python script to run unattended every morning, I feel I can't control it.

"Inventing a new language complicates large models ability to generate such scripts..."

I tried to keep it as small as possible and borrow a lot from what I knew models had seen in makefiles, YAML-ish, etc.

That was actually the question I began with. What would a make file look like if I were using it to make a classic markdown skill? Asking that question, sort of spawned the rest of it.

I tested the language against cold agents in both frontier model and local model camps to see where they had difficulty nad made changes as required. The lint approach as well as help topics from the MCP helped a lot.

"AI Showing..."

Yea there is a certain irony there. I freely admit product was written with Claude Code. I wrote the Product Requirements & Engineering Requirements and reviewed the code, so I can say I own it.

"Consider the recursive nature of the problem you’re solving..."

That framing is better than mine. When a frontier model writes a skillscript, there's not much chance of something slipping by. Over time, I've become cautiously open to the model adapting the skillscript to solve problems as they occur. Example, a skillscript runs every morning and checks github for PRs and issues. The agent when woken after the run 'noticed' an issue, fixed the script and it was ready for me to approve in the morning. Yes, that could have been done in Python, but I'd not be as confident about it.

I also really appreciate the link.