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Agent Skills

addyosmani.com

51–60 of 239 posts

Re: Agent Skills

#51

Cant wait for everyone to realize they've wasted a year + messing with agents and experiencing a feeling of psuedo productivity.

Right, just like all the productivity lost when people stopped using paper ledgers to mess around with these so-called 'databases'

Re: Agent Skills

#53
post #48

Why are people so excited to put themselves out of a job? Not that these or any "skills" will do that, but just- in principle. This is like alienation from labor at scale.

Some people are playing the global optimization game; a world where anyone can have any (production grade) software they want.

Re: Agent Skills

#54
Recently I have got an access(enterprise)to the latest ChatGPT module with an ability to write skills to automate repeatable taks. Without any prior knowledge I just started tinkering and now after creating and testing multiple skills in real business environment I can confidently say writing a good skill is a skill itself. As the author mentioned it's not an essay but a specific instructions sets organised in steps and in a concise manner.

Re: Agent Skills

#55

Cant wait for everyone to realize they've wasted a year + messing with agents and experiencing a feeling of psuedo productivity.

Trick is to not burn too much time worrying about the perfect skills and this and that. See a lot of people filling skills with LLM junk, or overdoing rules that start confusing the LLM. Just try Vanilla, see something you don't like? Then you make a skill and funnel the LLM to use it for the style of task it's working on. E.g. database work is a mixed bag with LLMs, they tend to do work in totally different styles if you leave them unconstrained.

Agents are unbelievably useful at helping takeover and refactor messy codebases though. I just started taking over this monstrous nightmare of a codebase, truly ancient code the bulk of it written over 10+ years ago in PHP. With the use of Claude / Codex I was able to port over the vast majority of the existing legacy storefront and laid the groundwork for centralizing the 10-20k LOC mega-controller logic over to reusable repo/service patterns.

Just shit that would've taking years previously, is achievable in under a month.

Re: Agent Skills

#56

Cant wait for everyone to realize they've wasted a year + messing with agents and experiencing a feeling of psuedo productivity.

i treat it like Minecraft automation - it's just for funsies and to pass the time haha

I don't think agentic workflows are there yet, but implementing skills to manually call and use while working side by side with an AI is definitely nice - our company is focused a lot on sandboxing right now and having safe skills

I don't think we've gotten feature development well yet, but the review skills + grafana skills they wrote have been pretty solid

Re: Agent Skills

#57
post #48

Why are people so excited to put themselves out of a job? Not that these or any "skills" will do that, but just- in principle. This is like alienation from labor at scale.

Because we've been automating large parts of our former jobs for decades. Otherwise we'd all be trying to build things in the least efficient way possible to maximize how long the job takes, which IMO isn't a great idea.

Humans have been minimizing how much work is needed to get a certain level of output for as long as we can track. It's civilization. Should we go back to farming by hand with hoes, to maximize labor used? Go back to streetlights that are individually lit? The society that falls behind on automation becomes poorer, and eventually just dies, as even the people born there tend to choose to leave to higher productivity places. It happened to eastern europe, it happens to the Amish. To any poor society which gets emigration. Doing more with less has always been exciting.

Re: Agent Skills

#58
post #6

From an SEO/LLMO perspective, the discoverability of these skills will be difficult without a rename: https://agentskills.io/ If Addy reads this, how do you pitch this vs. Superpowers? https://github.com/obra/superpowers

I would love to know how many people are actually using superpowers. I showed up on the agentic dev scene prior to superpowers, and I am getting concerned that >50% of my self-rolled processes are now covered by superpowers. I no longer trust gh stars, can anyone chime in? Is superpowers now truly adopted? If it is truly valuable, why hasn't Boris integrated the concepts yet?

I've used it off and on over the last month or so. For more complicated tasks (30+ minutes) it works well, and seems to replace a lot of prompting that I'd normally need to do (e.g. asking questions about requirements, creating specs and implementation plans, staying on task). For simple tasks, it tries to do too much and gets in the way.

Re: Agent Skills

#59
post #48

Why are people so excited to put themselves out of a job? Not that these or any "skills" will do that, but just- in principle. This is like alienation from labor at scale.

Because usually the people who lose their jobs are people who do not adapt to the market.

Right now it's not clear in which direction everything is involving and that's why people experiment with handing all their data to random agents, figuring out how to store and access context, re-use prompts and other attempts to harness this tech. Most of these will maybe be useless in a year as they might be deeply integrated into the next wave of models but staying on top of the development has always been part of the fun of working in this field.

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