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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?

#211

Post by ssivark »

ssivark wrote: post #15

To 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…

Don't know why the below comment by killix got flagged; it's a legitimate point.

In the current version of my setup, I've decided to accept that tradeoff.

But it would also be interesting to check whether agent behavior can be controlled well enough by a skill-management skill telling them to synchronously commit any changes with their signature; that would get the best of both worlds.

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

#212

Post by sejje »

listingbott wrote: post #177
misja111 wrote: post #157

Earlier 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.

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?

By watching them get it the first time, instead of watching them hit 10 locations before finding it.

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

#214

Post by vjvjvjvjghv »

chickensong wrote: post #40
vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“ determinist harness around the agent ” Can you explain what this means?

If you can express something deterministically with code, it's better to do that rather than have an agent do it, because it's faster, cheaper, and deterministic. E.g. you regularly copy file A to file B. You can ask the agent to do it, or you can write a script and have the agent call the script via skill. That's the beginning of a harness. Eventually you arrive at building custom software that does a lot in the tra…

That makes sense. Sounds similar to what I am usually doing. I let AI write a python script or similar, review it and then use the python script. I don't think I would let AI do anything important directly.

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

#215

Post by theahura »

First, a lot of people in thread are saying you don't need skills. This is pretty wrong. There is a lot of alpha in using any set of skills that implements SPACE (search, plan, assert, code, evaluate). See: https://open.substack.com/pub/theahura/p/agentics-using-meta...

Second, we share all of our sets of skills in a purpose built registry: https://noriskillsets.dev/ you can use any of our public skillsets from there. If you're on a team you can also sign up to get your own private registry. Makes organization much easier.

Finally, for local development, we use this CLI to manage skills (https://github.com/tilework-tech/nori-skillsets). This is a tool that lets you bundle skills into groups, and then switch between those groups. So for eg if I'm making a slide deck I'll use an admin skillset, and for coding I'll use a swe skillset, and for debugging I'll use a debugging skillset.

We do keep tinkering with our skillsets, but not very much. I don't get the need to adjust things for every model release, doesn't seem necessary for us in practice

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

#217

Post by well_ackshually »

jurgenburgen wrote: post #103
stingraycharles wrote: post #53

Earlier 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.

Anthropic must love you. Re-blow hundred of thousands of tokens to relearn how to use your profiler and build system at every debugging attempt.

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

#218

Post by bensyverson »

theahura wrote: post #215

First, a lot of people in thread are saying you don't need skills. This is pretty wrong. There is a lot of alpha in using any set of skills that implements SPACE (search, plan, assert, code, evaluate). See: https://open.substack.com/pub/theahura/p/agentics-using-meta... Second, we share all of our sets of skills in a purpose built registry: https://noriskillsets.dev/ you can use any of our public skillsets from there…

I'm building something similar with `Agents`[0] (think of it as a package manager for AGENTS.md snippets). I'm getting good results by including detailed instructions for certain tasks in the repo, and providing hints in AGENTS.md about when to use them. It's basically a simpler version of Skills—but it feels like AGENTS.md adherence is higher than Skill adherence.

[0]: https://github.com/bensyverson/agents/

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

#219

Post by HumblyTossed »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #117
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.…

>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…

> I think waaay more people struggle with this than HN would have you believe.

I'm sure we all know. I mean, just ask anyone to write a story and break it into small tasks that can each be accomplished completely in a day.

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

#220

Post by ryaniscool »

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.…

There needs to be a word for this type of interaction because it’s so common in software engineering:

Q: I need help doing X

A: if you’re doing X, you’re doing it wrong.

I propose the word shamesplaining. What do you think?

Not saying your opinion isn’t valid. It just doesn’t answer the question and it’s disturbing that this is the top voted answer. It sounds more like a criticism than an answer.

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