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Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
301–310 of 327 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#302[dead]
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 tend to agree. Skill files become less useful as developer skill increases. As a skilled developer my repetitive instructions are mostly one or two sentence phrases for staring something like a highly-interactive planning session, or a self-supervised implementation session with my preferred setup of implementation and review subagents. I can specify those out by hand, or save a couple keystrokes with a tiny skill…
I still find the superpowers to be very useful, just as a way to manage the feature process, getting you a spec to go with the feature, quizzing you about edge case handling.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#304- I don't find skills, I create them - Keep them organised in software repos that you install with symlinks for all coding harnesses that you have. Progressive disclosure based on the frontmatter does the rest. - I make sure they work with AI evals. Think of them like integration tests to prove behaviour. They're useful to optimize your flows. I try to make my skills be mostly a translation between natural language a…
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?
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Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're literally just documentation with a hat on. I don't mind a skill saying where the docs are but an overreliance on skills is simply proof someone isn't able to reason about the gestalt
My approach is different. Skills I write mostly use Python to save on the agent needing to run its own loops. I use these loops to monitor the CI build and PR approvals rather than having the agent poll, and even Opus gets the commands wrong enough to make it worth it. Last week I wired up a skill for the agent to share screenshots in PRs via specific S3 buckets and AWS CLIs. Again, the agents guess at the right comm…
the problem with that, that i'm seeing is just the sheer proliferation of internal skills. There are now so many that I can't see how they can possibly remain maintained.
It feels like at the project/product/middle management layer this type of 'big pile of skills to do some very specific task' is very popular. I think this is probably for a few reasons.
I think the largest factor is that these task management items are really just like .. calling a few different apis and slapping it through some jinja to post to github and create a jira ticket.. whatever. For an engineer, we can knock that out over coffee. But for this middle management layer, not a lot of them have the will or the skills to pop open the ide and code themselves a tool. Until the advent of skills that is. So I think they are a bit drunk with power. Which yaknow we'll see.
The skills are starting to become the documentation for these types of things as well as a way to automate it. This is great, but this type of 'documentation' is exactly the type of thing that goes non-updated for years in some dark corner of confluence. So I suspect the little used skills are going to fall to 'context rot'.
As an engineer, I keep all those skills in one very specific claude project and keep that largely separate from any given claude session that's helping me design a feature.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Can you elaborate why a debugging skill would save those tokens?
Rather than teach the agent where grafana is, how to use a sentry trace id to find a otel traceparent, where my ALB is, I'm what clusters do what, which namespace prod is in, what our stack looks like, that thing that looks broken actually isn't, etc etc etc. I just paste in the sentry trace id, a guess of what might be wrong ("i think we overtuned gunicorn again" or "developer bob pushed short sha 123456 and nothing is working") and say "use your investigate skill" then get up and go get a coffee and usually by the time i get back i have an investigate doc filled out from a common template in my notes repo. The agent almost never spends any time spinning it's wheels finding out what the various environments do, where they're located, what our metrics and logging looks like, how to access it etc etc.
To be fair it's the only skill i have/use but I got real tired of explaining the same 12 things over and over. Having it document every incident means I have a dense library of every problem we've run into over the last six months which helps identify recurring problems for RCA
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#307Skills 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 don’t think it’s about telling agent what to do with skills for most part anymore as well.
Problem is not having to remember to run agents in exact sequence and not having to repeat the processes.
That’s why I’ve created ctx traits and using them everyday, biggest wins for me are: sync across repos using git-based dependency manager and validator, which ensures version of the process / knowledge I’m using has been approved by me and hasn’t moved without my approval (similar to dependency managers lockfile approach).
This has allowed me to use same traits (it’s extension of skills with typed schemas and procedures, you can use skills with it as well as usual) across different repos without any copy pasting etc.
There are additional cool things like type-driven procedures with specific harness/agent associations and many more cool things coming soon.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#308I’ve tried to keep up with “best practices” around AI use, but things are improving so quickly that I’ve largely given up. The vanilla agents are just fine for my needs as they come.
Can you elaborate more how do you setup vanilla agents ? Which agents you use and which use case that it’s greatly show benefit for you. Thanks
That’s what I’m saying, I don’t set it up. I just install Claude code and I’m good to go.
Managing configuration files feels like worrying about fine-tuning in 2023
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#309Skills 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.…
Depends on what you do. If you work with proprietary tech that is not in LLM training data and can't easily be found on the internet, you're cooked without good skill files.
Yes, but isn't that kind of a waste? If there's not enough AI training data or even just the internet, how can we find information just from a command called a skill? It would be nothing?.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#310Skills 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.…
TIMTOWTDI. "[T]hings shared with the team (in the repo)" implies project-specific skills. See e.g. https://github.com/mattpocock/skills for a stellar example of third-party skills for battle-hardened workflows.