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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?
#222[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#223Skills 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.
It's called the xy problem already.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#224wdym "your skills files"
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#225Skills 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.…
My company ran a test and found that they reduce token output on flagship model by something like 2-4x, and that number has been increasing with newer models. I suspect the increased subagent usage is driving this trend, because this means we're relying on models to do their own prompt engineering. Yes, they are just text, and can therefore be replaced with good prompting. However, this also means they confer a real…
I am somewhat confused by takes like this. Of course skills are just prompts, this is the whole point.
A skill is just a stored prompt you want to put more information into than you're likely to type out every time you intend to do that thing. Documentation of a business process.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#226Earlier 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?
Both, in a way. In order to be sure it's the skill reducing token usage, you measure it with and without the skill, and then you do that periodically to account for all the other variables.
Alternatively, you pick a belief based on prior evidence from either approach you mentioned, which is the natural thing that many of us do.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
My company ran a test and found that they reduce token output on flagship model by something like 2-4x, and that number has been increasing with newer models. I suspect the increased subagent usage is driving this trend, because this means we're relying on models to do their own prompt engineering. Yes, they are just text, and can therefore be replaced with good prompting. However, this also means they confer a real…
I am somewhat confused by takes like this. Of course skills are just prompts, this is the whole point. A skill is just a stored prompt you want to put more information into than you're likely to type out every time you intend to do that thing. Documentation of a business process.
What are you confused by? You're saying the same thing they said.
They added the additional claim that writing the skills down (apparently) prevents the models from having to self-prompt on the fly and therefore reduces token consumption.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#228[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#229I 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.
I made an agent skill for `tsort` and that unlocked a lot of interesting things.
Giving the agent an external tool to consider the sequencing of anything with dependencies led to some creative construction and offloading sequencing not unlike offloading calculation. (I also made a `bc` skill).
https://github.com/sj4nes/clanker-tools is where I've been riffing on this. My plan is to collect not "just skills" so much but "capsules" of reliable knowledge that agents can pull without confabulation. I'm already hitting the organizational stumbles, so this HN thread is right-on-time.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#230I make skills to allow AI to integrate with my platform; it's documentation with cURL commands. It can interact with every aspect of my platform via HTTP and access its full capabilities. I can tweak its token permissions as I like and revoke access if necessary.