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Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
51–60 of 305 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#52I 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.
Your agents.md is a good place for high level facts, but if you have something that requires a lot of info to explain (ie: if there is a complex build process, testing patterns, things like that), loading up your agents.md for every request may be a bad idea. Offloading that information to a skill ensures it's only included in the context if you're actually using it.
How about linking to a separate docs file from the Readme, same as how you'd split separate topics into different files for humans? The context cost is low and as far as I can tell it's pretty much how Claude's "memory" feature works.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#53- I don't find skills, I create them - Keep them organised in software repos that you install with symlinks for all coding harnesses that you have. Progressive disclosure based on the frontmatter does the rest. - I make sure they work with AI evals. Think of them like integration tests to prove behaviour. They're useful to optimize your flows. I try to make my skills be mostly a translation between natural language a…
People always say this about the evals, but I find it hard to have a practical implementation of such a thing where you won’t end up spending 100x the amount of time on the evals than building the skill itself.
Like, ok, I have a debugging skill, now how do I make evals except for the most trivial things?
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#54I 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.
So the term used internally is to make things "Determinishtic". I use skills extensively, combined with SOPs, scripts and MCP servers.
An example skill I have is SessionMiner, which is installed via post session hooks in Claude and Kiro, and analyzes the session, what was accomplished, and whether or not it should be turned into a skill, then when it summarizes it, the decisions it came to and either fires off a message to me for followup if it decides a new skill or tool should be built, or it catalogues the approach so that future analysis can identify trends in how I use the tools.
Over time it has built me a fairly decent stable of repeatable skills and tools, and highlighted process deficiencies and nominated process changes that I have pursued.
Another skill is a communications analysis skill; I started using it summer last year I think, and it scans my communications across a broad cross-section of my activity online. It tracks the commitments I make, ensures that I follow up with people that I might miss, ranks and scores my communication against my own personal targets that I set to make sure that I am communicating effectively. As a person who has had a decently successful career despite autism spectrum and unmedicated ADHD (I was medicated, but unfortunately each medication I tried had adverse side effects), it has made me much more effective in tracking work and following through, especially on the "boring" stuff that is actually critical to being a dependable team member, and effective partner for the teams I support.
Just a couple of examples.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Isn’t that what the agents.md in your project is for?
Depends on how much information and details you have. The agents.md always goes into context. Detailed testing or process information might be excessive, when agent is working on UI. Skills are pulled when needed.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#56Skills live in two source-of-truth git repos (private and public). Agents edit skills by my request, and syncs to all coding agents ~/.claude/skills/, ~/.codex/skills, ~/.pi/agent/skills, ~/.config/opencode/skills etc. with agent written sync-agent-skill script. script ensures that no local changes was made in-place.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#57I 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.
Gateway drug is “/grilling” by Matt Pocock.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#58Skills live in two source-of-truth git repos (private and public). Agents edit skills by my request, and syncs to all coding agents ~/.claude/skills/, ~/.codex/skills, ~/.pi/agent/skills, ~/.config/opencode/skills etc. with agent written sync-agent-skill script. script ensures that no local changes was made in-place.
Why do you use so many different agents if I may ask?
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#59- I don't find skills, I create them - Keep them organised in software repos that you install with symlinks for all coding harnesses that you have. Progressive disclosure based on the frontmatter does the rest. - I make sure they work with AI evals. Think of them like integration tests to prove behaviour. They're useful to optimize your flows. I try to make my skills be mostly a translation between natural language a…
People always say this about the evals, but I find it hard to have a practical implementation of such a thing where you won’t end up spending 100x the amount of time on the evals than building the skill itself. Like, ok, I have a debugging skill, now how do I make evals except for the most trivial things?
A skill should only document behaviour the LLM didn't/couldn't exhibit on its own.
So you take your failed case (eg. working with gdb or whatever), write a skill and then test for that failed case.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
People always say this about the evals, but I find it hard to have a practical implementation of such a thing where you won’t end up spending 100x the amount of time on the evals than building the skill itself. Like, ok, I have a debugging skill, now how do I make evals except for the most trivial things?
A skill should only document behaviour the LLM didn't/couldn't exhibit on its own. So you take your failed case (eg. working with gdb or whatever), write a skill and then test for that failed case.
There are also skills that help LLM do the thing it can do without the skill, but faster (by cutting out unnecessary discovery). I guess for such skills the fail case is "being slow"?
I imagine many fail cases can burn a lot of tokens/usage/time because failing LLMs can be very persistent. Maybe some upper bound (turn count, timeout) would help too.