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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?

#31

Post by winternewt »

I keep my skills in a Home Manager repo and install them into my .claude / .codex / whathaveyou directory through the home manager config. I'll know if they don't work because they are specific instructions on how to git commit, how to merge code, how to author text (without the typical AI tells), or API usage documentation for specific libraries, etc. If they didn't work the agent would do things incorrectly and I'd notice.

And sometimes it doesn't follow the instructions well. I have a skill for that too: it tells the agent, given what it knows about attention and LLM:s in general, to evaluate the instructions and the mistake the LLM made, try to diagnose why it didn't follow the instructions as expected, and come up with an improvement of the skill based on that diagnosis.

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

#32

Post by kkarpkkarp »

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

I create/edit/delete at least one skill per day. I can't imagine working effectively without those files.

The most common case: if I see something took AI too much time and tokens and it is done, I ask my Cursor immedietly after to save it as skill. So next time I do the same I just refer to skill. I don't need to remember the name of the skill, I just mention something like "do {explaining briefly the task}, you have done something similar in the past and it is saved as skill"

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

#33

Post by politician »

I wrote a small command-line tool that installs skill packs into agent-specific project folders. It works pretty much like `brew` (or any package manager, really). The skills are compiled into the binary so that I don't have to worry about where they're located and can quickly move the skills between machines by copying the tool.

Making sure they actually work? Trial and error, mostly. I know some folks have tried auto-researcher approaches, but I haven't found that to be the best use of time in my work.

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

#35

Post by Sherveen »

I have a repo/project called Loadouts & Summons. It has a primary skill, `capsule`.

All skills, MCPs, CLIs, etc. live inside of it. I have it symlinked to all my dev machines so that it doesn't have to be an MCP.

`capsule` is then progressive to dozens of skills/tools thru `capsule` -- ex. `$capsule plannotator [args]`.

In some harnesses, I make it human-invoke only, and call it directly. In others, I let the model invoke it, and it has a top-level description that hints at what's inside.

Maximal context/session start control and capability extension.

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

#36

Post by chandureddyvari »

I commit them to git(so complete team leverages them)., each repo has kind of different skills and the skills are the ones which I update at least twice a week. I’ve skills on how to add instrumentation , debug, code, code review, tech design review etc. I found most of the skills I find on skills.sh are not very useful for me., but I browse occasionally to get some inspiration. One more paradigm I’m seeing good results on adding new skills is ‘how to do X’, for instance ‘how to add logs’., “how to review code” etc., if i’m not able to frame it that way I don’t think it’s a good use case for me to add that skill to the llm arsenal.

Another thing i discovered is less is more (in case of skills as well)., don’t add lots of skills., keep them very handful - I’ve got 9 skills so far (many people have 100s installed from marketplaces and plugins)

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

#39

Post by theletterf »

We keep the skills in a repo, where an agentic workflow runs biweekly to check if their content drifted compared to the docs and opens PRs if they did. The repo is also a Claude plugin. The biggest problem is keeping skills up to date across users, so I developed a small Go binary that takes care of that across harnesses.

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

#40

Post by chickensong »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #21
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?

If you can express something deterministically with code, it's better to do that rather than have an agent do it, because it's faster, cheaper, and deterministic. E.g. you regularly copy file A to file B. You can ask the agent to do it, or you can write a script and have the agent call the script via skill. That's the beginning of a harness.

Eventually you arrive at building custom software that does a lot in the traditional way, but delegates certain tasks to the model where it makes sense or it's non-trivial/impossible to express via code.

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