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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?

#21

Post by vjvjvjvjghv »

serf wrote: post #2

>I believe skills will eventually be eating by model capabilities a model capability is never going to fill in an unknowable blank that a custom skill (or whatever equivalent your paradigm supports) can. a model might have the cleverness to whoami and look through the .ssh folder for keys and evidence of past connections when asked to connect to bob, but a skills file can just easily say "We connect to bob using key…

“ determinist harness around the agent ”

Can you explain what this means?

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

#22

Post by LTL_FTC »

nvch wrote: post #18
WatchDog wrote: post #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.

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

Claude will do this for you after a few times. But yes, I have a skill called plan-to-epic which creates a Jira epic and ticket per milestone. It helps my agents persist context and, because I’m terrible at competing with my coworkers for “visibility,” means I can point to all my work if asked.

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

#23

Post by skybrian »

WatchDog wrote: post #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.

I have a couple of skills with project-specific conventions for how to write a plan and how to write HTML-generating code. But they could probably just as well be .md files in a docs directory, linked to from the AGENTS.md file.

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

#25

Post by killingtime74 »

WatchDog wrote: post #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.

It's not that, is for: Ensuring certain vetted implementation method is used. E.g. you always want tests or docs, or always done.

Caching certain scripts so it's not reinvented each time with risk of error/need reviewing.

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

#26

Post by dxjxjdjsssb »

WatchDog wrote: post #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.

I use skills for offloading work onto subagents. By configuring the skill to use a specific model it gets enforced at the harness instead of depending on the good will of the orchestrating model to actually delegate. This also saves context.

Today Fable had to fetch a zip file from a web page with a eula prompt, then get at a file in a disk image in the zip.

This is something that will need to happen a lot as part of this project.

I asked Fable for a skill/script combo suitable for Haiku to accomplish the task, and now that task happens at minimal cost during an analysis run.

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

#27

Post by squirrellous »

WatchDog wrote: post #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.

One way I use skills, which I don’t see mentioned very often, is as “shortcuts”. Imagine some frequently issued prompt like “fetch origin and rebase this branch onto origin/master and resolve conflicts”. I make that into a little skills file called “rebase” with a one sentence description, and next time just type something like “/reb-tab-enter”.

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

#28

Post by gavmor »

WatchDog wrote: post #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.

Well, for non-general tasks, of course. For example particular tooling that's required for the environment.

I will often make a skill out of the docs for any of the frameworks or libraries that we're using but with which I'm unfamiliar. When I'm creating that skill, I focus on idiomatic implementation and usage. It's not enough for the code to work—I want it to work "with the grain" and "through the front door", as it were.

By default, these models are just all too willing to reinvent the wheel and monkeypatch as they go.

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

#29

Post by pletnes »

WatchDog wrote: post #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.

I make skills for «this is how I like to do things in this company / project». Query test database, git branch names, commit message style, which cloud things can be inspected like logs etc. I don’t see the point in trying to teach the models things that is in the documentation of git, python, what have you. They already know.
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