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My Agent Skill for Test-Driven Development

saturnci.com

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Re: My Agent Skill for Test-Driven Development

#3
post #2

Snake oil. Just ask the model, all these custom agents/skills haven't proven that useful in practice.

I've found them useful for in house stuff where you are using a specific design system or architecture. But custom everything works best. Are that Claude works well on its own though at this point.

Re: My Agent Skill for Test-Driven Development

#4
post #2

Snake oil. Just ask the model, all these custom agents/skills haven't proven that useful in practice.

not that i know much about the effectiveness of these skill files, i find it odd to call something given for free "snake oil", which i thought referred to the sale of fraudulent products (to the benefit of the snake oil salesperson), typically around healthcare-related stuff.

Re: My Agent Skill for Test-Driven Development

#5
post #2

Snake oil. Just ask the model, all these custom agents/skills haven't proven that useful in practice.

Skills already are "just asking the model". Unless you'd prefer to type out the same instructions every single time?

Skills are literally just Markdown documents that get loaded into context when the /skill-name is invoked.

Re: My Agent Skill for Test-Driven Development

#6
post #2

Snake oil. Just ask the model, all these custom agents/skills haven't proven that useful in practice.

I disagree. Not all skills are useless. For example, I sometime use Qt for GUI projects and I have found their skills [0] very useful to improve the quality and performance of my projects. I their absence, I would each time have to direct the agents to find the docs or specific tools, wasting tokens and thus decreasing the quality of the output.

[0] https://github.com/TheQtCompanyRnD/agent-skills

Re: My Agent Skill for Test-Driven Development

#7
post #2

Snake oil. Just ask the model, all these custom agents/skills haven't proven that useful in practice.

I don't think the idea of skills is quite snake oil. It seems you can change what LLM outputs next by what's called few-shot prompting or in-context learning: https://www.promptingguide.ai/techniques/fewshot

Re: My Agent Skill for Test-Driven Development

#8
This article would benefit from a date. It looks like it's recent (Internet Archive first grabbed it on May 29th) but it's the kind of information that can quickly become stale as models and agents improve.

(I've been getting solid results recently from simply telling Claude Code and Codex "Test with uv run pytest, use red/green TDD".)

Re: My Agent Skill for Test-Driven Development

#9
post #5
post #2

Snake oil. Just ask the model, all these custom agents/skills haven't proven that useful in practice.

Skills already are "just asking the model". Unless you'd prefer to type out the same instructions every single time? Skills are literally just Markdown documents that get loaded into context when the /skill-name is invoked.

I think they're maybe confusing Skills and MCP servers

Re: My Agent Skill for Test-Driven Development

#10
post #5
post #2

Snake oil. Just ask the model, all these custom agents/skills haven't proven that useful in practice.

Skills already are "just asking the model". Unless you'd prefer to type out the same instructions every single time? Skills are literally just Markdown documents that get loaded into context when the /skill-name is invoked.

i belive gp means llms produce what they see in training data/rl there isnt much too much customization you can do with skills.

they are being sold as more powerful than they are. Like llms are intelligent blank slates that can be customized with mere markdown files.

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