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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?

#141

Post by invaliduser »

jiaosdjf wrote: post #113

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 sho…

I mainly use them as macros. Not even an advanced and smart macro system, just plain basic macros to avoid copy-pasting recurrent prompts. Is there more to them?

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

#144

Post by jaapz »

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.…

> "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.

I have three development machines. You kinda need something like git to keep everyone in sync!

And there's still value in encoding a process in a skill - it's way more token efficient to tell the model what but also HOW to do something. Otherwise, it just spends a lot of tokens figuring out something that they previously did already.

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

#145

Post by InsideOutSanta »

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.…

Depends on what you do. If you work with proprietary tech that is not in LLM training data and can't easily be found on the internet, you're cooked without good skill files.

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

#147

Post by p2detar »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #145
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.…

Depends on what you do. If you work with proprietary tech that is not in LLM training data and can't easily be found on the internet, you're cooked without good skill files.

I agree it depends, but I can offer another angle: By writing a few py tools and creating skills around them I was able to save tokens, so these skills were cost-effective in my case, they lowered the cost of the tasks I execute.

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

#148

Post by lovetocode »

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.…

This could be better summed up to the misuse of skills. Skills were not designed to be a way to make an agent more intelligent. Instead, skills are designed to allow agents to have certain tasks that are repeatable and predictable. It’s a misnomer really.

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

#149

Post by nsonha »

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.…

Not everyone use AI only for coding, for “code smell” being even applicable here. Many of my skills are just processes distilled from actual sessions doing odd tasks and coordinating different tools. It’s pretty reasonable to assume that it saves the agent from repeating that first time exploration fumbling

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

#150

Post by skeledrew »

I mostly prompt my own skills, and add a self-improvement directive (to those I think can use it). Usually if a skill isn't working (well) there will be extra tool calls. Actually that's usually the trigger to create a skill in the first place: multiple tool calls to do a repetitive task, where those tool calls can be reduced. But from comments on most AI-related posts, people are hardly-if-ever reading the agent transcripts (and the self improvement directive doesn't always get triggered) so their skills never improve.
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