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Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?

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71–80 of 327 posts

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

#71

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.

[flagged]

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

#72
post #56

Skills 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.

Codex and Claude Code both respect ~/.agents/skills; you don't need to have ~/.codex/skills and ~/.claude/skills .

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

#73
Skills that are so generic that you can find them on the internet, and which you think can be replaced by model improvements, are useless, possibly even harmful, considering how much the models get clingy to the context. Useful skills describe workflows specific to your project, and they can live in the project repo for everyone to use and improve.

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

#74
Disclaimer: I hand curate them in the end

I keep most of my sessions in Zed (you can import them there anyway). After some big feature I let a frontier agent go over these sessions and suggest improvements. Typically I use gemini for this because it's really good at pruning text. Claude/GPT really wants to append more text for some reason.

I end up with smaller skills but more "actioned" skills. They kind of force the agent to do things the way that works well.

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

#76

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 resu…

Thats exactly how I use skills as well and I got great results with it. I work in a proprietary codebase with a lot of niche or custom tooling, weird technical details and historical quirks. What skills do for me, is essentially skip the "learning" phase of an agent working in the codebase. With a fitting skill the agent does not need to read the tooling docs, look at existing repos and learn the coding style, but it can get to work immediately.

This is probably less relevant for code that exists a ton in the LLM training data already as an llm is probably competent to some degree in that anyway.

A big caveat here is though that now you need to treat your skills repo very carefully as mistakes in there can easily spread to all of the new code you write using a coding agent.

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

#77
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…

How do you disseminate that information to humans?

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

#79
Last week I had to reuse homemade skills on different project. I very much liked the AI proposed solution and it works quite well: ship as a plugin and add your git repo as a marketplace.

The installation is effortless and I don't have to mess with symlinks as I may be working with same codebase on different platforms which would make things.. different.

  codex plugin marketplace add "https://path-to-my-git-repo"
  codex plugin add agent-tools@mycompany

  claude plugin marketplace add "https://path-to-my-git-repo"
  claude plugin install agent-tools@mycompany


Let the AI generate .json files for marketplace.

Haven't got to these bits yet, but I'm sure they will work as easy as install does.

  claude plugin marketplace update mycompany
  claude plugin update agent-tools@mycompany

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

#80
post #29

Earlier 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?

Skills are evaluated by short description whether to read them into context.

Skills itself may be lengthy so...

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