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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?

#281

Post by yokuze »

veb wrote: post #280
yokuze wrote: post #276

I commit my standard set of agent configuration (including Skills) to this repo, similar to how many people have a "dotfiles" repo: https://github.com/yokuze/aix-config Then, I use this tool: https://github.com/a1st-dev/aix to keep my Claude, Codex, and OpenCode in sync with my config. The major benefits are that my adoption/deletion of skills, rules, hooks, MCP servers, etc. are deliberate, versioned, and shareable.…

interesting project mate. I have struggled with this as I built my workflow to rely on Claude, but when I put Codex into the mix it became a bit of a hassle, will check it out.

Cheers!

There's also a command you can run to convert your Claude config to what Codex expects: `aix sync claude-code --to codex --dry-run` (just drop the --dry-run flag if the result looks good to you).

More here: https://aix.a1st.dev/editors/migrations/how-to-migrate-from-...

Feel free to suggest any improvements or features you'd like to see, or let me know if you find any bugs.

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

#282

Post by anony-123 »

picklenerd wrote: post #249

I 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…

What are the benefits of skills at all. Does it increase the capability of the LLM?

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

#283

Post by mlmonkey »

estearum wrote: post #227
colechristensen wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think skills also count towards the token counts. In the end, everything becomes a 1-D array of input text.

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

#284

Post by vorticalbox »

anony-123 wrote: post #282
picklenerd wrote: post #249

I 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…

What are the benefits of skills at all. Does it increase the capability of the LLM?

If you have a certain set of actions that repeat a lot or if you have scripts that need ran.

A skill can help so the model doesn’t need to relearn how to use said scripts.

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

#286

Post by notatoad »

stanmancan wrote: post #47
pletnes wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I make skills for «this is how I like to do things in this company / project». Query test database, git branch names, commit message style, which cloud things can be inspected like logs etc. I don’t see the point in trying to teach the models things that is in the documentation of git, python, what have you. They already know.

Isn’t that what the agents.md in your project is for?

yes, it is. it's almost exactly the same thing.

skills are just an agents.md broken up into chunks so you can manage and share them separately. unfortunately there's no real good workflow for managing or sharing them separately, so most people end up treating them exactly the same way they do agents.md.

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

#287

Post by ryandsilva »

After a brief 'collect-them-all' phase, I scaled back to skills I've hand-selected & created to help me run repeated processes.

To keep me organized, here's the directory structure I use. So I don't have to think about it, I've created a skill for my skill folder that files any new skills in this structure as I add / ablate any that aren't useful.

   - `Discovery/` — Finding docs, searching, information retrieval
   - `Execution/` — Running processes, CI/CD, releases, deployments
   - `Planning/` — Goals, specs, tickets, threat models
   - `Tools/` — Reusable tool integrations (browser, notebooks, CLI creators)
   - `Debugging/` — Debugging, troubleshooting, fixing
   - `Expertise/` — (reserved) Domain-specific deep knowledge
How skillshare helps: symlinks across agents, syncs to my GH, and for the few skills I've pulled in from other repos, it tracks and handles updates. Every couple of months I review which ones I don't use and remove them.

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

#288

Post by jrockway »

anony-123 wrote: post #282
picklenerd wrote: post #249

I 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…

What are the benefits of skills at all. Does it increase the capability of the LLM?

Skills are like human-readable computer programs. I have one to do releases at work; how to get the canary approved (2 slack messages required), how to ensure that the rollout is happening, what to look for while the rollout is proceeding (any incidents opened during the rollout? error rate look good vs. the non-drained pods?) and then how to repeat that process for the next two tiers. It keeps a ticket updated with the current status so others can follow along and not wonder "is there a release going on?" "did we do a release yesterday?"

You could also write a computer program to do this, but because so much random special stuff can come up during a multi-hour release, it's sort of great to not have anything hard-coded and to let a frontier model be there to assist you when things are weird. (Weird things that have come up -- hung kustomization controllers, release freezes, etc. When Claude notices during the release, you can just get a ticket to go fix it. When you're doing it manually, it would probably be a half hour of investigating "why didn't our release go here?". Such a time saver and a safety net on risky rollouts.)

So that's the sort of thing I use Claude for. Things that are computer-program like, but ad-hoc enough to not really want to write a computer program for it.

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

#289

Post by estearum »

mlmonkey wrote: post #283
estearum wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think skills also count towards the token counts. In the end, everything becomes a 1-D array of input text.

Yes, skills that are actually used count toward token consumption.

The question is whether the number of tokens required to achieve a certain behavior/intelligence/quality is equal between you manually providing those tokens via skills versus the model "deriving" the "skills" it needs on-the-fly in order to produce the outcome you want.

The claim above is that the former requires far fewer tokens.

Also skills only consume tokens when they are used, and part of the value is that the model will dynamically find and disclose only what's needed (assuming the skill is "well-designed").

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

#290

Post by blackhaj7 »

yokuze wrote: post #278
blackhaj7 wrote: post #275

Anyone got a good flow for sharing their skills across their various repos and apps? I ideally want to have a single place I store my skills with an easy way to make them available to my repos, Amp and ChatGPT desktop/iOS, Grok web but can’t see a way

Yes! See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49601053 Though it does not support ChatGPT (just the Codex part inside of the ChatGPT app), or Grok web (yet). But it does encourage you to keep versioned config in one spot. You can also commit repo-specific config to any project that has specific needs, and translate that config into . That can be helpful when working with a team or an open source proj…

Nice! Will check it out, thanks
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