Skills are quietly becoming the unit of agent knowledge • Hacker News Board

Re: Skills are quietly becoming the unit of agent knowledge

#11

Post by dmppch » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 8:53 PM UTC

The distribution problem is harder than it looks because it's actually a composition problem in disguise. A single skill is trivially shareable — zip it, gist it, whatever.

But in practice you end up with skills that depend on other skills, or a skill that assumes specific instructions are already loaded, conflicting skills, versioning and supply chain issues - and suddenly you need dependency resolution.

I've built a package-manager approach for this (APM - github.com/microsoft/apm) and the thing that surprised me most was how quickly even small teams end up with config sprawl - and how much a manifest that travels with the project helps.

The "too small for a repo" thing is real, but one pattern that works is having a monorepo per dev team or org with all skills and building jointly over there.

Re: Skills are quietly becoming the unit of agent knowledge

#12

Post by latand6 » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 10:01 PM UTC

dmppch wrote: post #11

The distribution problem is harder than it looks because it's actually a composition problem in disguise. A single skill is trivially shareable — zip it, gist it, whatever. But in practice you end up with skills that depend on other skills, or a skill that assumes specific instructions are already loaded, conflicting skills, versioning and supply chain issues - and suddenly you need dependency resolution. I've built…

Yeah, I've built my own skill-package manager as well btw! Then it clicked and I hyperfocused for a whole week and vibecoded a skill marketplace haha. Because the selling of a skill seems to sound like a new idea. going to write a show HN about that maybe

Re: Skills are quietly becoming the unit of agent knowledge

#13

Post by latand6 » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 10:05 PM UTC

SirensOfTitan wrote: post #7

Most of this discourse feels like some kind of religious ritual built on the foundation of authority bias. Where is the evidence that skills improves performance over any other methodology outside of the fact of its nascent popularity? I do agree with Jacques Ellul in Technological Society that technique precedes science, and that's certainly the case with LLMs; however, this whole industry waves off rigorous validat…

The difference I'm noticing is in that with a proper skill you can skip the process of LLM wandering about and trying to guess how to interact with an API or else.

so they basically just save you time, even if they are 50% efficient of what it COULD be

Re: Skills are quietly becoming the unit of agent knowledge

#14

Post by latand6 » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 10:06 PM UTC

brazukadev wrote: post #10

rbitr wrote: post #4

Will skills replace MCP servers eventually?

How would it replace something that is not used widespread yet? I think both skills and MCP already have similar levels of adoption.

It's more - a SKILL can contain MCP :)

Re: Skills are quietly becoming the unit of agent knowledge

#15

Post by latand6 » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 10:07 PM UTC

moomoo11 wrote: post #5

How are skills different from Having the agent create todo-the-ticket.md (with me) that contain the work scope and steps. That’s what I do for each ticket.

Skills are repeatable workflows, that could be extracted as unit of work I guess

Re: Skills are quietly becoming the unit of agent knowledge

#16

Post by moomoo11 » Tue, Mar 24, 2026, 7:24 PM UTC

latand6 wrote: post #15

moomoo11 wrote: post #5

How are skills different from Having the agent create todo-the-ticket.md (with me) that contain the work scope and steps. That’s what I do for each ticket.

Skills are repeatable workflows, that could be extracted as unit of work I guess

Yeah but each ticket is different I guess.

Idk I just never used skills. I have an architecture md (kind of like a skill in that it’s static? It always reads this first), and todos for every single ticket the AI goes through and does it. I have like 90% plus success.