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Agent skills that bring team coding standards to Claude Code and Codex

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Re: Agent skills that bring team coding standards to Claude Code and Codex

#21

Post by dawnerd »

Stitch4223 wrote: post #4

The promise is nice, yet I find the readme very hard to understand. So I’m not sure how it solves these problems exactly. First off I would expect a (team) methodology to be referenced. There are tons to choose from. From that point on other terms may make more sense. For example: “ Pillar 2: Product Strategy & Architectural Governance (PDRs & ADRs) Factor III — Mission Definition. Factor IV — Structured Planning. Fa…

I couldn’t get past the first couple lines. It’s clear no human reviewed that.

Re: Agent skills that bring team coding standards to Claude Code and Codex

#22

Post by jillesvangurp »

I created a simple git repository with company skills. Basically just a collection of skills around tools and practices we share. One of the skills is "update company skills" this simply pulls the changes from git and wires them into the user's ~/.codex directory. You can probably do something similar for claude code.

This is far from perfect but we're in this weird transition phase where none of the major AI tool providers are really focusing much on team use of their stuff. But I expect that will start changing soon.

Current tools mostly focus on individuals doing things in isolation. And of course in a team there's more to collaborating than throwing stuff at each other via github. A central repository of company skills is merely our way of improvising a solution.

I find it interesting that Anthropic hired a few of the key people behind Zulip recently. Team chat with tightly integrated AI tools could be a missing piece here. Team communication flows and processes, including ways of working and guardrails are sort of the next piece of the puzzle here. Going from everyone doing their own thing to teams and companies doing things together is going to be a bit of a journey.

Re: Agent skills that bring team coding standards to Claude Code and Codex

#23

Post by clamshelldev »

The split that has worked best for me is to keep agent instructions about intent and workflow, then move anything mechanically checkable into tests, linters, or build gates. More rules in context are not enforcement.

For a central skills repository I would also record the exact rules revision in each run or generated artifact. Otherwise a failed run becomes hard to reproduce after the shared repository changes. It would be useful if each skill declared which claims are advisory and which are backed by a command the agent can execute and verify.

Re: Agent skills that bring team coding standards to Claude Code and Codex

#24

Post by taude »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #22

I created a simple git repository with company skills. Basically just a collection of skills around tools and practices we share. One of the skills is "update company skills" this simply pulls the changes from git and wires them into the user's ~/.codex directory. You can probably do something similar for claude code. This is far from perfect but we're in this weird transition phase where none of the major AI tool pr…

We have the exact same thing, we actually install a "plugin" engineering/org wide, and one of the skills in there, is a /skill-mananger skill that can browse other skills in another repo, install, uninstall, and create new ones with all our specific requirments. Semantic versioning allows us to have a hook to auto apply updates, too.

Seems to be helping people share things around the org.

Re: Agent skills that bring team coding standards to Claude Code and Codex

#25

Post by taude »

cautiouscat wrote: post #14

IMO, these agentic guard rails aren't the answer. It seems like we're seeing that the more you stuff context, the more the agents forget and don't follow the guidelines.[1] Things like ArchUnit, static analyzers, and other deterministic tools can help with lower level things like architecture. For higher up stuff, I am increasingly feeling like agents don't guarantee anything and in many cases its just the opposite.…

Our skills and agents use deterministic tools for things like: linting, ayy1, etc....

Re: Agent skills that bring team coding standards to Claude Code and Codex

#27

Post by jondwillis »

cautiouscat wrote: post #14

IMO, these agentic guard rails aren't the answer. It seems like we're seeing that the more you stuff context, the more the agents forget and don't follow the guidelines.[1] Things like ArchUnit, static analyzers, and other deterministic tools can help with lower level things like architecture. For higher up stuff, I am increasingly feeling like agents don't guarantee anything and in many cases its just the opposite.…

I’ve found hooks to be really useful for correcting or inducing certain behaviors/outcomes that tend to occur during agentic development.

For example, I’m working on a project to remake the Final Fantasy XI client. My repository has a bunch of git submodules that reference other peoples’ related efforts, and an open source server. For example, despite including CLAUDE.md to suggest otherwise, Claude Code always ends up writing these insanely dense comments referring to specific files and lines of code in submodules. When those submodules update, now the comments are no longer correct.

So I added a hook to detect when comments are included. Then, for example, I have a deterministic heuristic and script involved to remove some kinds of comments, and another that asks Haiku to quickly LLM-as-a-judge whether or not to edit/remove the comment.

Similarly, I have a stop hook that reminds Claude to commit its code logically on main, noting that other changes may have been added by other concurrent sessions (I avoid worktrees and even branching for this particular project and stage of development.) It works well.

Re: Agent skills that bring team coding standards to Claude Code and Codex

#28

Post by tosh »

I know it sounds a bit counter-intuitive but

try a fresh coding session without skills, agents.md, system prompt and additional tools

I think you will be positively surprised how good current models like GPT 5.6 Sol are when they are not oversteered and context spammed

Here is a task (python templating) with 9 runs with OpenCode, Pi and smol

https://smolenv.com/t/nested-template-includes-60636/

you can read each run step by step and see what the agents are doing and how the system prompt and available tools are steering their behaviour to take longer and higher cost

(disclaimer: I'm working on smol)

Re: Agent skills that bring team coding standards to Claude Code and Codex

#29

Post by tosh »

tosh wrote: post #28

I know it sounds a bit counter-intuitive but try a fresh coding session without skills, agents.md, system prompt and additional tools I think you will be positively surprised how good current models like GPT 5.6 Sol are when they are not oversteered and context spammed Here is a task (python templating) with 9 runs with OpenCode, Pi and smol https://smolenv.com/t/nested-template-includes-60636/ you can read each run…

I'm not saying system prompts, agents.md, tools, skills don't have their place

actually the opposite: they matter a lot because they do steer the agent

with great power comes great responsibility

Re: Agent skills that bring team coding standards to Claude Code and Codex

#30

Post by tosh »

tosh wrote: post #28

I know it sounds a bit counter-intuitive but try a fresh coding session without skills, agents.md, system prompt and additional tools I think you will be positively surprised how good current models like GPT 5.6 Sol are when they are not oversteered and context spammed Here is a task (python templating) with 9 runs with OpenCode, Pi and smol https://smolenv.com/t/nested-template-includes-60636/ you can read each run…

Pi is pretty good actually

(it has way less context spam, fewer tools and smaller system prompt than the usual suspects)

databricks also looked at this: https://earendil.com/posts/pi-autoresearch-and-databricks/

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