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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?

#311

Post by picklenerd »

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?

No it customizes the capabilities of the LLM to your own workflows.

I don’t like the Q&A tools built into my agent harnesses. I have a skill that describes how to ask me questions, including a template and a few rules for more rare situations.

Instead of typing an 80 line prompt every session about how to ask me questions, I just tell my agent to use this skill.

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

#312

Post by InsideOutSanta »

satirr wrote: post #309
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?.

I'm a bit confused by what you're asking.

Let me give you an example. Let's say you're building processes using the process management tool FooTool from the company BigFoo. You tell the LLM, "make a new process." A process is just an XML file, but BigFoo is highly proprietary, so the LLM has no examples of how to make one. No public documentation exists on the Internet, so it's not in the LLM's training data and can't be searched.

So you make a skill "make FooTool process" that explains what a FooTool process XML looks like, what options there are for initializing a new FooTool process, and so on.

Now your LLM went from "Let me spend five minutes looking at other stuff in your repo to find anything that tells me what I'm supposed to do" to 20 seconds and a working process.

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

#313

Post by voidmain42 »

I'm pretty late to this thread, but I battled with the whole "keep them organized" issue across 20+ repositories. I see a lot of folks suggesting scripts and symlinks, but I stopped using that approach because filtering (i.e. figuring out which files belong in each repository) and syncing became a headache.

The Agency HQ (https://theagencyhq.dev) is another approach that uses a central repository of skills, rules, and other files that are pushed down to developer machines and then placed into project directories as needed. It uses a simple daemon on to pull down the files and distribute them. And it supports filtering and translation for most of the popular agents.

Disclaimer, I wrote The Agency and it is in early stages. I'd love feedback if anyone gives it a test drive.

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

#314

Post by sinuhe69 »

fallinditch wrote: post #201

I read somewhere that Boris (created Claude Code) recommends deleting skills, and hooks every so often and then observe how the LLM performs without them. Maybe better to periodically prune: tweak some skills, shorten some, delete some.

Skills are for me special knowledges that an agent in general doesn’t know in details: using a specific framework, create reports, new programming languages etc. So having them not only enable the AI to work more effectively but also more efficiently and cheaper (why digging through the ten thousands lines of help again if it was already distilled?). I don’t use SKILLs for quirks and gotcha. They go into AGENTS.md because it’s always loaded and therefore much more reliable (there is a study about it). I consider SKILLs load-on-demand even though the agents can discover it and decide to load by itself.

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

#315

Post by tinodb »

mstr32 wrote: post #245
xpnsec wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where they are very useful is as a documentation source for LLMs. For example, I work in infosec and often have to reference DSLs (Cobalt Strike aggressor script for example). Having a skill which is an offline index to carved up function docs, which an LLM can use without having to think, then search for, then download huge 1 page documents with all function documentation, and pollute the context… very useful.

Looks like this is a combination of documentation with a skill, right? How do you manage these skills across projects?

Commit them in the root of your monorepo :P

Or create a repo for skills and have people check those out in their user skills dir.

Or in case of Claude, create a plugin that your people install.

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

#316

Post by rahimnathwani »

ssivark wrote: post #211
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.

"Don't know why the below comment by killix got flagged"

Because it's obviously written by AI.

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

#317

Post by xnx »

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.…

I largely agree, but skills are still useful for thing after the knowledge cutoff. (e.g. https://github.com/google/skills)

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

#318

Post by KetoManx64 »

jaapz wrote: post #144
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.…

> "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. If you have so many skills that you feel the need to manage them, that's a code smell. I have three development machines. You kinda need something like git to keep everyone in sync! And there's still value in encoding a process in a skill - it's way more token ef…

> I have three development machines. You kinda need something like git to keep everyone in sync

I got tired of the constant git push/git pulling just for inter machine transfer, now I just have a ~/Git directory with all my projects that I just Syncthing between my desktops/laptops and Syncthing ignore any repos that specific machines don't need

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

#320

Post by theahura »

kramer2718 wrote: post #269
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…

Can you compare what you have built with superpowers?

Yea, we like obra/superpowers a lot. For folks who are unaware, see: https://github.com/obra/superpowers

the original version of our high autonomy skillset was a fork of obra's superpowers back in...October? November? of last year. Whenever it first came out.

I think basically all of the best skillsets implement SPACE, including superpowers, mattpocock skills, get shit done, etc. There are aesthetic reasons why you might prefer one over the other, but candidly I think any of them will get the job done and are strictly better than not using one of the SPACE skillsets.

(I haven't played with the latest version of superpowers. My hunch is that on average our skillsets have better compliance rates with the models because of some of the ways in which we write the skills themselves, but its a hunch)

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