how did stupid markdown file become a thing, this industry really went to shit.
Should be .txt
Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
261–270 of 309 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#262I 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.
They're useful for one-offs. I don't manage them though.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#263There is a very similar connection in the relation of skills/mcp/… and everything related to a prompt: they are all just a special-purposed prompt named differently. In a way, it reminds me of the concept in OOO: we give lots of names to “design patterns”, even write books about it. But in the end, they’re all based on polymorphism. Know this fundamental and I feel less overwhelmed.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find them very useful.
I have been finding them decreasing in the effectiveness with each model release. We got rid of skills and built a determinist harness around the agent instead.
I use skills to automate non-development workflows, like for malware analysis, etc.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#265Two ways I use skills
1. Personally - these are for apps I use like Codex. This one is pretty simple
2. For our product (which is mostly an internal tool, with minimial customer facing UI) - we have a skills factory that lets our employees create reusable instructions for our internal agent (fully custom built harness with routing). User describes the task and writes the instructions (can attach reference files, etc.). Custom skills and their versions are stored in postgres, with attachments in file storage. The assistant loads those instructions and references when it uses the skill. To update a shared skill, users edit a draft, test it, and submit it for review. Once approved, that version becomes live. Skills can learn or rewrite themselves from conversations (cuts a new draft and prompts the user if they want to update/improve the skill).
EDIT: I should say that our employees have a particular set of expertise and knowledge that make skill sharing insanely useful. Which is why I took the time to build this out. It's helped reduce manual work, and has increased our AI usage drastically. We also measure AI output (in terms of quality) and the reduction in slop has sky rocketed.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#266Skills 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.…
I think eventually, some form of self updating llm memory will replace skills, but in the meantime it is token inefficient for the model to have to parse the entire repo from scratch every time, and skills are an imperfect way to shortcut some of that (drawbacks being the skills are sometimes wrong or outdated)
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#267I 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.
So the term used internally is to make things "Determinishtic". I use skills extensively, combined with SOPs, scripts and MCP servers. An example skill I have is SessionMiner, which is installed via post session hooks in Claude and Kiro, and analyzes the session, what was accomplished, and whether or not it should be turned into a skill, then when it summarizes it, the decisions it came to and either fires off a mess…
"Another skill is a communications analysis skill"
It is interesting how people delineate what is a "skill". A 50 word prompt can be called a skill. This process you are describing sounds like it is highly authed and polling or hooked into multiple apps (slack?, text messages?, email?, forums, etc.) and then piping output to an LLM and to generate reports that it pushes to you based on output. You might need some data store to hold all the different communications locally as well.
That is almost a full on app/service that uses an LLM for one layer, but it is still just called a "skill".
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#268I don’t find skills. I write my own skills based on things I do frequently and repeatably. I keep them version controlled locally and in GitHub, and I symlink that folder to my various agent skill folders so they all stay up to date. I feel like downloading a bunch of skills is another one of those useless collections people make purely because they have infinite options. It’s like those collections of thousands of b…
+1
Skills are used to steer individual models towards desirable behaviors they don't exhibit by default. They're not Pokemon cards. They clutter your context, sometimes for essentially 0 benefit.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#269First, 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…
Can you compare what you have built with superpowers?
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#270WTF is a "skill"? I really think people are getting ahead of themselves here. You wrote some bullet points so your agent harness doesn't keep making builds in the wrong environment? You have a very specific debugging setup? Your agent doesn't understand when to rebase? README is where you should be writing anything specific to your project, and if you're worried about context size then your README is too long, it sho…
a skill gets injected into context in a certain way, and behaves in certain ways with respect to things like compaction.
the readme and agent.md are not the right places to put long workflows worth of llm instructions, and also isnt the right place to put global details.
skills also get a piece of text injected into context all the time, so the agent gets a hint to go read and follow the whole thing, without needing to embed the whole definition into context all of the time.