Never understood the “skills” part tbh. Thse models are being trained in trillions of texts. Adding something small and particular about my codebase doesn’t really move the needle
Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
131–140 of 305 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#132[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#133Skills 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.…
Where they are very useful is as a documentation source for LLMs. For example, I work in infosec and often have to reference DSLs (Cobalt Strike aggressor script for example). Having a skill which is an offline index to carved up function docs, which an LLM can use without having to think, then search for, then download huge 1 page documents with all function documentation, and pollute the context… very useful.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#134[dead]
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#135Never understood the “skills” part tbh. Thse models are being trained in trillions of texts. Adding something small and particular about my codebase doesn’t really move the needle
I think it's developers coping with not coding anymore.
There is this urge to create a non-ephemeral library of at least something.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#136Skills 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 skil…
The closest I get to finding skills useful is when I find myself repeating myself to an LLM. This tends to happen most when I am starting new projects and want to communicate basic design principles and patterns to follow and libraries to use. What I did was to factor and store these "chunks" of instruction in some text files. I then made a little script that can list what chunks are available and when given a subset will essentially `cat` the selected files to emit AGENTS.md content which I save into the new project or append to shore up an existing one.
Your observation on the readership bias of HN is a good one for people to add to their HUMANS.md before reading and commenting. :)
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#137I don't like skills. It's a really annoying form of technical debt, especially when people try to fill up company repos with random skills they think are so cool. Same goes for polluting a repo with custom instructions.
I only want the model to have the tools it needs to get the job I ask of it done.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#138To the extent that skills are contextual guidance (for this author, this project, etc) and not just (raw) capabilities they are unlikely to be eaten by models. I maintain all my skill files in a central location (like dotfile management) and have guix home sync it to the skill folders of various harnesses that I'm playing with (codex, pi, antigravity, Claude Code, Deepseek harness, etc). They're set up to be bidirect…
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Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#139I basically create a skill when I'm tired of always writing the same prompts, and then I adapt it over time.
I have like 3 skills, and so far so good, most of my recent changes have been asking Claude to please stop using metaphors and creative figures of speech that make the documents so much harder to read and understand (maybe it's only annoying to non-native speakers, I don't know)
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#140Get them under version control.
I have a git repo with my skills for software development [1]. There is an installer script that symlinks to the skills. Updating the skills on a machine is then just a matter of advancing the git repo. One of the skills comes with some bash scripts, but the rest are effectively just prompts.
Putting project specific skills in projects works well.
I make sure they work by understanding every skill, reviewing pull requests, and testing the end product. The result is rarely perfect, so I am constantly tweaking the skills and how I use AI.