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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?

#171

Post by walthamstow »

igor_nast wrote: post #108
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.…

100% - influencers pretend they know something and produce all in one skills pack - that doesn't make sense

Great way to go viral though

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

#172

Post by swingboy »

Zambyte wrote: post #50
WatchDog wrote: post #14

I don't use any skills, what kinds of skills are people finding most useful? For general tasks, the model seems perfectly capable of figuring out things itself, for project or environment specific tasks, I just put that information in the readme or agents.md file.

Your agents.md is a good place for high level facts, but if you have something that requires a lot of info to explain (ie: if there is a complex build process, testing patterns, things like that), loading up your agents.md for every request may be a bad idea. Offloading that information to a skill ensures it's only included in the context if you're actually using it.

The content of AGENTS.md is typically included in the system prompt and benefits from prompt caching.

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

#173

Post by edf13 »

One thing to consider when you do look at how you manage your installed skills - is the security side of them.

You also need to manage the authority of each skill too. Signed skills is a step in the right direction, but it only proves provenance and doesn't prove behavior.

(Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49597166)

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

#174

Post by bhkdotdev »

> "make sure they actually work?"

I've been working on a tool (https://dynobox.xyz) that acts as a deterministic integration test / behavioral test layer for some of the skills i've been working on / sharing.

It feels like a full eval suite is a bit heavy handed and really all I care about is if certain files are touched / left alone or if my skill is actually read. The tooling has much more functionality built in if you want to check it out!

For skill files / prompts I share I make sure that I use the cross harness functionality since I use codex but a bunch of my coworkers use claude (and then one using antigravity...)

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

#176

Post by specproc »

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.

Yeah, this is my use case for skills. Even with good documentation, it feels better to have things local and easy to tweak.

I'd add to that I've also used them as a style guide. The project involved taking in unstructured inputs and creating structured outputs. Lots of choices along the way, and it seemed a neat way to encapsulate decisions we'd made as a team.

Storage, well it's just for the one project, so the repo. Can't say I've used them beyond that.

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

#177

Post by listingbott »

misja111 wrote: post #157
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.…

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.

How do you actually measure the token savings? Do you compare the same task with and without the skill, or is it more of a noticeable difference over time?

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

#178

Post by bjconlan »

I have an old colleague who I've been leaning on for ai things (they're more on the pulse than I) who uses cue (cuelang.org) for distributing and formalizing a set of skills/prompts.

It's the best thing I've come across (that I don't need to mange myself) https://github.com/p3bot/start

The tool itself does more than just manage skills/prompts but I found that part of it particularly good (well new to me; not familiar with cue but the idea seems like a good fit)

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

#179

Post by breckenedge »

mhh__ wrote: post #169
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.…

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

My approach is different. Skills I write mostly use Python to save on the agent needing to run its own loops.

I use these loops to monitor the CI build and PR approvals rather than having the agent poll, and even Opus gets the commands wrong enough to make it worth it.

Last week I wired up a skill for the agent to share screenshots in PRs via specific S3 buckets and AWS CLIs. Again, the agents guess at the right commands often enough to make it worth being explicit.

Sure these could have gone in CLAUDE.md, but not every agent needs the context.

And at the company level, I can push skills to everyone’s Claude via the Teams function, they don’t need to edit configs or even know what a skill is.

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

#180

Post by mhh__ »

breckenedge wrote: post #179
mhh__ wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

My approach is different. Skills I write mostly use Python to save on the agent needing to run its own loops. I use these loops to monitor the CI build and PR approvals rather than having the agent poll, and even Opus gets the commands wrong enough to make it worth it. Last week I wired up a skill for the agent to share screenshots in PRs via specific S3 buckets and AWS CLIs. Again, the agents guess at the right comm…

small behaviours are fine, yes, what i was referring to was people making "foobar api skill" with just a bad compression of the foobar docs in a .md
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