by not having them at all.
Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
121–130 of 314 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#122Skills 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 th…
I tend to agree. Skill files become less useful as developer skill increases.
As a skilled developer my repetitive instructions are mostly one or two sentence phrases for staring something like a highly-interactive planning session, or a self-supervised implementation session with my preferred setup of implementation and review subagents. I can specify those out by hand, or save a couple keystrokes with a tiny skill file.
But if you are not a software dev you might lack the vocabulary to tell the agent what you want. If you don't know what tenant isolation is, chances are your app will have a broken security model because you can't ask for it, and probably won't think to ask the agent for a security review either. Skills can mitigate a lot here
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#123Skills 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 find them useful for deploying task specific agents, like reviewing Jira tickets, or otherwise ensuring compliance in open format submissions.
Otherwise I agree, and you don't even have to be that verbose with prompt engineering these days as LLMs have gotten increasingly good at figuring out what you want.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#124Skills 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 th…
> 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.
Skills and agents in the Claude world can also be extended and evolved over time, as they are committed "code".
For example, we have an agent which can take a statement or a support ticket and identifies the services, tenants and infrastructure components likely meant in the ticket or request. Similar to a skill, Claude can invoke this on demand in a conversation.
This started very simple, but various people spent time tuning it over the last 4-6 months. They have "taught" it to pick up on jargon from different departments, writing style of different departments, how they think about their systems.
With all of that tuning over time it has become quite "clever" in identifying the mentioned systems and - if requested - the train of thought leading to this conclusion.
Similar things are happening with skills for various task, be it Ansible integration tests, upgrade chores and so on. The first version can be fairly underwhelming, but continuously improving it after each usage can make them very powerful.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#125The internet has broken me. Whenever I see a question like this i now automatically expect it to be some marketing attempt. There will be a product/service/blog post somewhere in the comments.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#126Nowadays I often create skills myself (or with the aid of coding assisants) for any repeating tasks. For example, I use my own skill to make Claude CLI send the worktree to codex cli for the review, then read the verdict and make changes
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#127I've got a skill repository on github, and I got a hermes automation to sync skills repo - this hermes automation is on every device.
Any skills I make on the fly - my global AGENTS.md has instructions to update the skills repo path and place them appropriately in there.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#128I’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.
Can you elaborate more how do you setup vanilla agents ? Which agents you use and which use case that it’s greatly show benefit for you. Thanks
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#129Personally I have found "meta-prompting" to be much more useful than any pre-canned set of skills. Simply ask the AI (inside of a workspace already set up):
Create a standalone prompt to
The latest AIs will print out a long prompt with all of the assumptions, tools, and general files it plans to use. Review that, and then run the whole prompt in a new context.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#130Skills 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 are spending time on all text forums like this, you are likely a person whose skill set skews towards the verbalization of abstract concepts. This is also the exact skill set needed to use LLMs well. If you are able to articulate exactly what you want in a concise prompt, little else is needed.
I think we tend to overlook the fact that LLMs have tilted the scales heavily in favor of those with good verbal skills. A huge portion of the population (including a portion of highly skilled software engineers) is not great at doing this. For them, harness skills still act as a kind of scaffolding; they support automated work on a project in cases where insufficient details is given in the prompt.