the only ones {i use,claude decides to use} regularly come with claude code plugins so they automatically update. i just define the marketplaces and plugins in my .claude/settings.json for the project.
Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
101–110 of 296 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#102[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#103- 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?
Why do you have a debugging skill? Just tell it to read the docs.
Skills are for packaging instructions for how to interact with your organizations homebrew process and tools. By definition skills shouldn’t be useful outside of your org because they’re just docs and third party tools already have them for humans.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#104We have an ongoing discussion and some fans of https://microsoft.github.io/apm/
Because it's from Microsoft and sounds sufficiently enterprisey probably.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#105Skills are mostly snake oil, the way people use them (the aspiration to download kung foo from a celebrity).
There was a time when maybe it mattered (last year), but with good repos and good prompts today's agents can find exactly what they need without any skills.
"Skills" as developer macros can be useful, but at most those are things shared with the team (in the repo), not something you download from the internet. If you have so many skills that you feel the need to manage them, that's a code smell.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#106Not really related but I wonder how people benchmark the effectiveness of skills/agents?
I'm seeing the agent working quite fine with just direct prompting and the agent doing things by itself rather than using skills. Is it better for certain task size?
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#107I’ve tried to keep up with “best practices” around AI use, but things are improving so quickly that I’ve largely given up. The vanilla agents are just fine for my needs as they come.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#108Skills are mostly snake oil, the way people use them (the aspiration to download kung foo from a celebrity). There was a time when maybe it mattered (last year), but with good repos and good prompts today's agents can find exactly what they need without any skills. "Skills" as developer macros can be useful, but at most those are things shared with the team (in the repo), not something you download from the internet.…
100% - influencers pretend they know something and produce all in one skills pack - that doesn't make sense
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#109[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#110I don’t seem much point to intentionally curating a set of skills, and specifically invoking them by name, only to watch the ai skip them all and do better by just reading code and internal/external websites.