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Show HN: Sx 2.0 – Share AI skills with your team through a Dropbox folder

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Re: Show HN: Sx 2.0 – Share AI skills with your team through a Dropbox folder

#11

Post by detkin »

timmit wrote: post #9

Will a team wise GitHub repo a better solution? - free version control - one line set up

sx has a git vault storage layer, or a local file layer or a server backed vault.

The thing it buys you over vanilla git is that you don't have to sym-link dirs for different AI harnesses. And, you can share skills across repos and teams without having to copy them into different repositories.

All that said, with the right setup, I think that vanilla git is a great answer. But if you start to want to bundle collections and share across teams and repos things start to fall apart.

Do you try to share across teams or repos? Or with non-technical teams?

Re: Show HN: Sx 2.0 – Share AI skills with your team through a Dropbox folder

#12

Post by bberenberg »

detkin wrote: post #7
bberenberg wrote: post #6

Hey Dylan, long time. The solution we landed on was that the skills should be authored by a small set of people who know what they’re doing and made available to non technical team members “magically”. This means either use your IT systems to push the configs, or embed them into an agent that doesn’t live on the desktop. We’ve gone the latter route and are building a whole company around solving this for regulated cu…

Hey man! Yeah, many of the non-techincal folks I've spoken to are using claude.ai or chatgpt.com. But I've been amazed at how many are using Claude CoWork or even Claude Code. The theme seems to be wanting the same set of knowledge across any and every tool they use, without having to worry much about the mechanics of the how. I agree that for security and governance conscious orgs a more robust server-side solution…

Yup I agree with the consistent access across surfaces ideal. WorkOS has some cool piping to support this and uses it for their internal version of the same thing. I think everyone experimenting here is a good thing. I expect we’ll end up with a few good commonly use OSS approaches, a few tech companies with NIH syndrome versions for their needs, and commercial options like we have with past technologies. These are more reflections of culture amongst buyers than anything else.

Re: Show HN: Sx 2.0 – Share AI skills with your team through a Dropbox folder

#13

Post by detkin »

trollbridge wrote: post #10
detkin wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that that works pretty well for developers who work with a code repository everyday. But, if you're working on a mono-repo, you can end up with more skills loading than you'd like pretty quickily. Have you had success with non-technical people using git as their primary sharing source?

Git has easy to use GUI tools, particularly if you’re willing to use GitHub. I have not had trouble getting non technical staff to use it (book editors, graphic designers, writers, copywriters)

Very cool, sounds like you have some technically open-minded co-workers.

Do you just create a claude or codex plugin in git for them? Since they likely aren't working against any code repos?

Re: Show HN: Sx 2.0 – Share AI skills with your team through a Dropbox folder

#14

Post by sdesol »

detkin wrote: post #5
est wrote: post #4

We hosted shared skills via a git repo. Simple pull & push would do.

I agree that that works pretty well for developers who work with a code repository everyday. But, if you're working on a mono-repo, you can end up with more skills loading than you'd like pretty quickily. Have you had success with non-technical people using git as their primary sharing source?

My extension for pi https://github.com/gitsense/pi-brains solves the too many skills problem and it can be adapted to work with any coding agent that supports hooks like Claude and Codex.

You can find a simple example at https://github.com/gitsense/gsc-rules-demos which shows how skills can be injected when needed. The example is:

"read the file at data/accounting/q1.ledger and explain what this ledger tracks"

If you know what the use needs to read or edit, you can inject knowledge/skills for the agent.

Re: Show HN: Sx 2.0 – Share AI skills with your team through a Dropbox folder

#15

Post by detkin »

est wrote: post #8
detkin wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that that works pretty well for developers who work with a code repository everyday. But, if you're working on a mono-repo, you can end up with more skills loading than you'd like pretty quickily. Have you had success with non-technical people using git as their primary sharing source?

yeah skills overwhelming is a problem. Splitting into sub-dirs works for now. For us it's mostly developers.

That makes sense. The one thing that really bugs me about git sharing is when you have different repos but want to share the same collection of skills. We have three different golang projects/repos. They follow very similar patterns and can share a bunch of skills but I don't want to copy/paste into the different repos and have them drift.

I also like having a system on top that manages our evals so I know when I can retire a skill that isn't pulling it's weight and I can see the usage stats to understand which skills are making a real difference.

Re: Show HN: Sx 2.0 – Share AI skills with your team through a Dropbox folder

#16

Post by detkin »

bberenberg wrote: post #12
detkin wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey man! Yeah, many of the non-techincal folks I've spoken to are using claude.ai or chatgpt.com. But I've been amazed at how many are using Claude CoWork or even Claude Code. The theme seems to be wanting the same set of knowledge across any and every tool they use, without having to worry much about the mechanics of the how. I agree that for security and governance conscious orgs a more robust server-side solution…

Yup I agree with the consistent access across surfaces ideal. WorkOS has some cool piping to support this and uses it for their internal version of the same thing. I think everyone experimenting here is a good thing. I expect we’ll end up with a few good commonly use OSS approaches, a few tech companies with NIH syndrome versions for their needs, and commercial options like we have with past technologies. These are m…

It also wouldn't surprise me if the model companies ship a strong version of this to try to lock us all in a bit more.

I hope that's not the case, or at the very least one storage and distribution system will work for all harnesses.

Re: Show HN: Sx 2.0 – Share AI skills with your team through a Dropbox folder

#17

Post by btown »

We've adopted a simple/similar Dropbox-based approach for skills and rules - each person's ~/.claude/skills is actually symlinked to a folder just for them inside a shared Dropbox folder, one that others on our (small) team can see and edit as well.

This solves a set of problems around people writing skills that reference artifacts or other skills that only exist on their system, and/or that reference their own name/information as the creator, and not knowing to make them self-contained and replicable. Luckily, adapting your colleagues' skills to self-contained versions and pulling them into your folder is trivial to instruct an agent to do. And you can have meta-skills that do this on the fly if a colleague has a skill that would unblock your project! (Editing to add a tip: make sure all the folders are set to offline visibility in Dropbox, rather than being loaded on demand from online.)

The courtesy simply has to be that you don't write into other people's skill folders unless/until they ask you to maintain something for them - at which point the words "I am assuming direct control" are said with all the necessary gravity and effect.

It's great to see someone putting UI and guardrails around this pattern!

Re: Show HN: Sx 2.0 – Share AI skills with your team through a Dropbox folder

#18

Post by angry_octet »

I can't think of anything worse than sharing skills via Dropbox. The version management and AIBoM problems that generates is extremely painful. There's no way to track which version LLM is being used or match it against the skill, and people will likely load up too many skills.

You don't have to expose git repos to end users to use git, or some other database, to provision skills.

Re: Show HN: Sx 2.0 – Share AI skills with your team through a Dropbox folder

#20

Post by detkin »

btown wrote: post #17

We've adopted a simple/similar Dropbox-based approach for skills and rules - each person's ~/.claude/skills is actually symlinked to a folder just for them inside a shared Dropbox folder, one that others on our (small) team can see and edit as well. This solves a set of problems around people writing skills that reference artifacts or other skills that only exist on their system, and/or that reference their own name/…

The one place I’ve seen this break down on teams is when a skill gets improved or adjusted. If everyone is copying it you end up not knowing which the best and most accurate. We worked with a team that had 5 copies that had all drifted.

That is why we built the deduplicator extension for sx. It finds the dups and lets you use the llm to build the consolidated “best” version of the skill.

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