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Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?

#11
We have some company-managed skills, that help coding agents find the relationships between our repos, and our conventions, architecture, and other high-level decisions. These are supposed to be portable between agents, and so distributing them is currently awkward.

We have a bootstrap script to deploy company-managed skills to each developer's "personal" skills. Hooks for codex and claude code try to refresh the skills on each startup.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?

#12
I recently completely overhauled repo’s skill setup.

I tried to control the execution of tasks performed by each project using claude.md within the project, but claude.md is only read at the beginning of each session, so it felt like the instructions weren’t being properly reflected.

So I revised the strategy to manage frequently used features in skill units. In doing so, instead of organizing skills by project, it was structured to be integrated into the general skills of the individual repo.

When skills are spread out across multiple projects and the number increases, it becomes impossible to keep track of which skills are available, so they end up not being used.

I also think that eventually, once Claude(model) advances, it will be able to replace most of the skills, so I believe registering and managing countless skills actually degrades performance.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?

#14
I don't use any skills, what kinds of skills are people finding most useful?

For general tasks, the model seems perfectly capable of figuring out things itself, for project or environment specific tasks, I just put that information in the readme or agents.md file.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?

#15
To the extent that skills are contextual guidance (for this author, this project, etc) and not just (raw) capabilities they are unlikely to be eaten by models.

I maintain all my skill files in a central location (like dotfile management) and have guix home sync it to the skill folders of various harnesses that I'm playing with (codex, pi, antigravity, Claude Code, Deepseek harness, etc). They're set up to be bidirectional links rather than read-only like the default configuration, so I can keep editing them / adding to the corpus from any harness.

This works well for skills since all harnesses expect the same format, but is more annoying for other features.

EDIT: This is actually an example of a potentially useful skill. You might choose to manage your skills slightly differently. All you need to do is write a skill-management skill for your agents to be able to wire things up correctly / access them for edits.

Some other nifty skills/plugins in my experience: render latex equations, cetz diagrams inline, jujutsu, guix, code reviewer, writing feedback.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?

#18

I don't use any skills, what kinds of skills are people finding most useful? For general tasks, the model seems perfectly capable of figuring out things itself, for project or environment specific tasks, I just put that information in the readme or agents.md file.

For starters, if you repeat a specific prompt multiple times per day, you may save it as a skill.
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