61–70 of 133 posts
How are skills different than tool/function calling?
I agree. I don’t see how this is different from tool calling. We just put the tool instructions in a folder of markdown files.
If there was a marketplace or directory of skills.md files that were ranked with comments, it would be a good idea for the propagating of this tech
So if you have subtle logic in a Skill that’s not mentioned in a description, or you use the skill body to describe use-cases not obvious from the front-matter, it may never be discovered or used.
Additionally, skill descriptions are all essentially prompt injections, whether relevant/vector-adjacent to your current task or not; if they nudge towards a certain tone, that may apply to your general experience with the LLM. And, of course, they add to your input tokens on every agentic turn. (This feature was proudly brought to you by Big Token.) So be thoughtful about what you load in what context.
See e.g. https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/a6974087e5c04fc711af68f...
Skills, plugins, apps, connectors, MCPs, agents - anyone else getting a bit lost?
In my opinion it’s to some degree an artifact of immature and/or rapidly changing technology. Basically not many know what the best approach is, all the use cases aren’t well understood, and things are changing so rapidly they’re basically just creating interfaces around everything so you can change flow in and out of LLMs any way you may desire. Some paths are emerging popular, but in a lot of cases we’re still not…
For LLMs, we're just about at the stage where we've realized we can jam a sharp thing in the spinny part and use it to cut things. The race is on not only to improve the motors (models) themselves, but to invent ways of holding and manipulating and taking advantage of this fundamental thing that feel so natural that they seem obvious in hindsight.
How are skills different than tool/function calling?
Close enough, welcome back index.htm, can't wait to see the first ads being served in my skills
Anthropic: Chief Product Officer of OpenAI
Something that’s under-emphasized and vital to understand about Skills is that, by the spec, there’s no RAG on the content of Skill code or markdown - the names and descriptions in every skill’s front-matter are included verbatim in your prompt, and that’s all that’s used to choose a skill. So if you have subtle logic in a Skill that’s not mentioned in a description, or you use the skill body to describe use-cases no…
Obviously they are empowering Codex and Claude etc, and many will be open source or free.
But for those who have commercial resources or tools to add to the skills choice, is there documentation for doing that smoothly, or a pathway to it?
I can see at least a couple of ways it might be done - skills requiring API keys or or other authentication approaches, but this adds friction to an otherwise smooth skill integration process.
Having instead a transparent commission on usage sent to registered skill suppliers would be much cleaner but I'm not confident that would be offered fairly, and I've seen no guidance yet on plans in that regard.