Skills are workflow caches
Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
161–170 of 318 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#162Skills 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.…
It's not about giving hints to agents because they wouldn't find it out otherwise. It's about saving the work of them having to find out. Good skills files save tokens.
Having too many skills files increase tokens even when they don't get fully read. It's a fine line.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not about giving hints to agents because they wouldn't find it out otherwise. It's about saving the work of them having to find out. Good skills files save tokens.
Having too many skills files increase tokens even when they don't get fully read. It's a fine line.
That's why you need to curate and adapt the skills for your specific project. That is, don't blindly accumulate skills downloaded from the web
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#164GitHub. Then you symlink them into the relevant folders. You can write a skill to manage them for you across all harnesses as well.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#165Skills live in two source-of-truth git repos (private and public). Agents edit skills by my request, and syncs to all coding agents ~/.claude/skills/, ~/.codex/skills, ~/.pi/agent/skills, ~/.config/opencode/skills etc. with agent written sync-agent-skill script. script ensures that no local changes was made in-place.
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Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That’s one, very narrow use case of skills.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#167Skills 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…
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Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#168Skills 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.…
Hah I think if a repo is “standard” enough that an agent can navigate it freely without any help or direction, maybe it’s not worth having altogether?
Even fable _regularly_ stumbles as big repos or custom configurations, even for projects that fable itself built with high dev quality standards and modern design direction.
It just can’t hold it all in its context and will be forced to do “software archeology” all the time to figure things out - yeah it will work _most_ of the time, but to truly be able to scale and have autonomous agents reliably work and mold your codebase you need a lot more structure - tests, lints, compilers, validators etc. Your “skills” or policy files are there so agents can resolve issues and heal things themselves without your explicit direction.
If I have several tabs, each holding an agent team, with each agent spawning subagents as it sees fit, all of that apparatus has to ground itself _somewhere_ and if you don’t make decisions yourself, it will make decisions for you, save them in its own skill files, but some of these you might not like.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#169Skills 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.…
They're literally just documentation with a hat on. I don't mind a skill saying where the docs are but an overreliance on skills is simply proof someone isn't able to reason about the gestalt
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#170Skills 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.…
Woaaah buddy this is such a wrong statement that I’d delete it if I were you. Can’t believe that people confidently spew blatantly false statements like this. Skills matter, a lot, to every action that requires the AI to find stuff out, so that it doesn’t have to find the same stuff out again. Operating a website, building PowerPoints the way you like them, operating across different surfaces like APIs + GUIs…otherwi…
I don’t feel strongly on skills either way, but why would you suggest GP delete their comment, without which we wouldn’t even be having this (in my view productive) discussion?