GitHub. Then you symlink them into the relevant folders. You can write a skill to manage them for you across all harnesses as well.
going to do that, very helpful!
Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
191–200 of 311 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#192I am yet to find a skill useful. It’s usually just vibecoded slop-bloat for a one-off somebody thought they document in a markdown file.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#193i use an agentic host folder, full methodology here: github.com/connollydavid/host
i then A/B test skills for terseness with weco’s auto-research within this using a much weaker model e.g. Qwen 3.5 4B
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#1945% git
95% rm
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#195I 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.
Something else I want to add on to be more specific is that I use skills to document tasks that my model doesn't know how to do out of the box. For example, there is a jira cli[0] that I use for interfacing with jira. If I just say something like "add an issue for X on jira", the model will have no idea how to interface with jira. I could add that the jira cli is installed on my system, but it's not popular enough for the model I use to just know how to use the CLI, and it will end up spending a lot of tokens guessing how to use it, failing, reading the help output, trying again, etc. Adding a skill for jira lets me capture how to use the cli, and makes prompts like the original usually work first try. If something still requires the model to iterate with the cli, I will ask the model why it failed originally, and ask it to update the skill file accordingly, to avoid the same failures in the future.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#196Mostly use homegrown skills. For shared skillset at work, it's a standalone repo with a script for everyone to install the full set. For a personal collection I also use a script to sync a few upstream ones to keep everything in one place.
For evals I use the method outlined in the `skill-creator` skill from Anthropic.
In the skills, I try to use scripts, along with templates and json worksheets, as much as possible to scaffold and validate the work to make things more consistent and reliable.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#197A few simple rules worked for me:
- start with zero skills
- add a skill if you encounter behavior that you want to ward against or if
you want to associate a meaningful phrase with a certain method of doing things
- NEVER copy a skill from someone, do not clone skills repos, do not let LLMs
write their own skills
- occasionally revise or delete a skill, less is moreRe: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#198I usually rm -rf them.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#199Skills 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.…
No, not really. Yesterday I asked Opus if it can read the logs from the sessions I have on the local ChatGPT app. It looked around and said no, that’s not possible. I said “what about these jsonl files in this folder?” It read them and said “ah yes these seem to be it!”
So I went ahead and created a skill for it. This is so that future Opus agents won’t come to the wrong conclusion the first one did. I can say “read the codex session titled ‘X’” And they will know exactly what to do and do it effortlessly.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#200Don't find them. Ask the AI to do something. When it does it correctly, ask it to make a skill for it. Clear the session, try to use the skill, fix any problems found, modify your repo and harness if necessary. Repeat until skill works 0-shot. Improve with the same process. This largely works with a specific model, specific harness, specific prompt, specific context. You may need to modify your agent harness to manag…
Im talking about skills like design critique, landing page creation....ect