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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?

#111

Post by JauntyHatAngle »

avaer wrote: post #105

Skills 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.…

Yes, skills as a "portable power" isn't really the use case for me unless it's entirely generic and even then sparingly.

I've mostly followed what anthropic suggests, which is putting less into context and more into skills, to keep the "how" out of context until it is needed to reduce context bloat.

Skills have some instructions but are primarily informed repo specific instructions and keep their context away from the rest of the repo to keep things sanitised for me.

I've found it to be useful in that context.

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

#112

Post by brokegrammer »

I don't use skills unless I have something specific to tell the agent. For example, if I want the agent to use Tailwind V3 instead of V4, I'll have a skill for that. Or, if I want the agent to always use the repository pattern for database access, I'll create a skill for that.

I don't need to manage skills files because I have so few of them and they're only a couple lines long.

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

#113

Post by jiaosdjf »

WTF is a "skill"? I really think people are getting ahead of themselves here.

You wrote some bullet points so your agent harness doesn't keep making builds in the wrong environment? You have a very specific debugging setup? Your agent doesn't understand when to rebase?

README is where you should be writing anything specific to your project, and if you're worried about context size then your README is too long, it should be just enough information for any competent dev or agent to get the gist of how you do things around here and where to look for deeper answers.

If your particular harness / orchestrator is just not pushing back enough or can't seem to solve certain problems then thats a tool issue, either edit the tool system prompts or move to better tools or models.

Calling this 'skills' is disingenuous, this word was chosen by marketers and implies some kind of deeper learning. I'm not saying there's no value in tuning prompts, but your 'skills' should be managed in only 2 ways: 1. It's specific to your project, it's a README, or 2. It's specific to your tooling, it's part of config, system prompts etc.

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

#114

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

Don't find them. Ask the AI to do something. When it does it correctly, ask it to make a skill for it. Clear the session, try to use the skill, fix any problems found, modify your repo and harness if necessary. Repeat until skill works 0-shot. Improve with the same process.

This largely works with a specific model, specific harness, specific prompt, specific context. You may need to modify your agent harness to manage skills depending on runtime parameters. Pi is a great general purpose agent for the these modifications.

If you do find other skills and want to use them, put them through the loop above. But keep in mind that since they were created in their own circumstances, they may not work in yours.

Also separate rules from skills. Rules tell AI when to do things, skills tell AI how to do things. Tool call/MCP limitations, agent configurations, and harness extensions, can help it stay on track.

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

#116

Post by saejox »

avaer wrote: post #105

Skills 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.…

i agree, skills downloaded from the internet are all snake oil.

creating your own skills however good for both reducing the token usage & increasing reliability. those damn llms are not deterministic, asking same thing twice produces 2 different results.

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

#117

Post by sigmoid10 »

avaer wrote: post #105

Skills 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.…

>but with good repos and good prompts

I think waaay more people struggle with this than HN would have you believe. In the real world, not everyone is a software dev with a developer mindset to using these tools. Normal people essentially type the equivalent of "Make me X!" and complain when the model assumes anything in their underspecified mess of a prompt. There are skills like grill-me that can potentially help these people a lot, but in the end I believe models will just be smart enough to understand your level of knowledge and intent to do this stuff on their own. They are getting much better on pushing back on poor user input already. The problem is that when they double down on hallucinations (very rare nowadays but I still see it happen in enterprise projects with the latest models). So you kind of need to know when to push back on the model as well. But for that you have to be really good at the subject.

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

#118

Post by flurdy »

resonious wrote: post #100
alexhans wrote: post #43

- 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…

Big yes on this. I do not understand the appeal of skill shopping. The one exception I have is things like the Axiom Apple development skills and e.g. the official Flutter skills. At that point the skills are just docs though. It's either I remember to paste a URL to the official docs or I just install the skill. But shopping around for random skills just sounds extremely unappealing.

I do both, or rather I do 'skill browsing', for new ideas to then evaluate the skill with my agent if they are useful. Most are not, but some I extract ideas from to augment my own skills https://github.com/flurdy/agent-skills/tree/main/skills#shar...

Though most of the time my skills are just things I found useful and could avoid repeating myself by having as a skill.

That I also use it to route model used with https://github.com/flurdy/pi-skill-model-router is also a reason

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

#119

Post by jdxcode »

for skills related to specific cli tools, i just wrote a standard for this! it's obviously not widely used yet, but since mise will support installing the skills alongside the tool, i suspect it will have decent adoption

i used to be a bit bearish on skills—thinking that llms should just use --help, but i've come around on that. i think skills are a great way to describe higher level workflows that use multiple commands.

https://jdx.dev/posts/2026-09-05-introducing-packslip/

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