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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?

#61

Post by jeffreygoesto »

dxjxjdjsssb wrote: post #26
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…

Did you consider writing a small Python script for that?

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

#62

Post by matsemann »

Skills is just a tech bro word for a simple markdown file with instructions.

No need to over complicate it. Write down things you feel like re-using. Like how to specifically implement something in your system ("when adding a new API endpoint we need to do x y and z", or "when making a github PR we tag Æ and Å") so you don't have to repeat it. And I mostly add it in cases where it didn't infer it itself. So very reactive, not proactive.

Most public skills are useless and over complicated. Lots of people are spending too much time on their harness, than actually making stuff.

Edit: but do get inspired by public ones. For instance a "grill me" skill can ve be useful, but I find the public one very mumbo-jumbo. But the idea of forcing the agent to ask clarifying questions is good.

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

#63

Post by sriniwasx »

matsemann wrote: post #62

Skills is just a tech bro word for a simple markdown file with instructions. No need to over complicate it. Write down things you feel like re-using. Like how to specifically implement something in your system ("when adding a new API endpoint we need to do x y and z", or "when making a github PR we tag Æ and Å") so you don't have to repeat it. And I mostly add it in cases where it didn't infer it itself. So very reac…

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

#64

Post by matsemann »

sampullman wrote: post #52
Zambyte wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That splitting is basically what a skill is, with some instructions as to when to load it. Depending on the harness used it might be quite equivalent, but not sure how easy it follows links in the readme compared to skills (which is just a glorified name of a readme anyways)

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

#65

Post by theletterf »

mstr32 wrote: post #48
theletterf wrote: post #39

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.

That's very cool. How does the binary keep skills updated across users?

It clones the skills repo if not present and relies on the git last commit as the "version".

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

#66

Post by hypfer »

matsemann wrote: post #62

Skills is just a tech bro word for a simple markdown file with instructions. No need to over complicate it. Write down things you feel like re-using. Like how to specifically implement something in your system ("when adding a new API endpoint we need to do x y and z", or "when making a github PR we tag Æ and Å") so you don't have to repeat it. And I mostly add it in cases where it didn't infer it itself. So very reac…

My genuine question is:

Are there any "skills" at all that have proven to be useful? And if so, what's the context?

Because, for me anyway, LLMs usually do one thing, and that then produces a durable artifact. So the prompt that got me there by that point expired and is not really needed anymore.

I also occasionally have recurring tasks (rarely though), but there, the prompt to do stuff is embedded in code that orchestrates the doing, so I have no use-case for that either.

___

For the "add this endpoint" example you've described, I just throw commit IDs at the clanker and say "go do that again". That works, and doesn't decouple knowledge from code.

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

#67

Post by hypfer »

ygjb wrote: post #54
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.

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 mess…

You're putting a lot of trust into the judgement abilities of what is just a next token predictor there.

I can see what the goals are there, and they do make sense I suppose, but I'm not confident that what you're handing off there can be handed off to that degree.

But maybe that is not the point and the point instead is to see what the LLM thinks would be correct, and then think about that and collect learnings about the world from it. It might not be right, but it still tells you how normal people think. So that's useful.

Just a very roundabout way to achieve that, but that's fine, I guess.

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

#70

Post by rctlabs »

jameshiew wrote: post #10

I manage them as part of my dotfiles using chezmoi. A `.agents/skills/` directory + a symlink to there from `.claude/skills/`. > Do you keep improving them over time? In my global AGENTS.md I have a note to agents to explain any frustrations they had doing a task, and to suggest any skill/tool/AGENTS.md improvements. I am trying to keep AGENTS.md files small but still finding the balance.

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