For things of global relevance, I keep a git repo in ~/.skills. It has a script that syncs skills across agent harnesses when run. If I think of an interesting skill that seems like it'd be broadly useful, I put it in this repo. If I want to use someone else's skill, I read it with my eyeballs, decide whether I like it, and then copy and paste it into the repo.
Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
321–330 of 333 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#322I’ve been keeping all skills in .agents/skills and symlinking .claude/skills, this way I can use them across both claude code and codex. One of the not so straight forward things is knowing what frontmatter overlaps, or subtle config differences exist for skills between tools, and making sure to take that into account.
I wrote a free tool to constantly diff the agent configs for a handful of tools I use. If interested you can check it out at https://frontmatter.news
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#323I 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…
Similar take here - I only find value in skills as a way to repeatably carry out tasks that are specific to my workflow; any skills I've seen shared broadly don't seem to add much value beyond what the model itself can already handle. At work I'll occasionally repurpose a skill that someone else has shared as a starting point, but those skills are already somewhat customized to the environment I operate in. I have al…
Tracking skill usage like this is really smart, stealing this!
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#324- 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…
Big yes on this. I do not understand the appeal of skill shopping. The one exception I have is things like the Axiom Apple development skills and e.g. the official Flutter skills. At that point the skills are just docs though. It's either I remember to paste a URL to the official docs or I just install the skill. But shopping around for random skills just sounds extremely unappealing.
Have you seen mattpocock’s skills? I know they are hecka popular with people I work with.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#325First, 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…
How do you think about using these vs using something like plugins + plugin marketplaces to distribute skills that ship natively in a lot of tools?
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#326Earlier 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?
Most guidance I’ve read, and experienced success with, is keeping a lean agents.md file and building out a tree of docs or skills that an agent can navigate via progressive disclosure.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#327For things of global relevance, I keep a git repo in ~/.skills. It has a script that syncs skills across agent harnesses when run. If I think of an interesting skill that seems like it'd be broadly useful, I put it in this repo. If I want to use someone else's skill, I read it with my eyeballs, decide whether I like it, and then copy and paste it into the repo.
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Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#328If your problem is keeping skill files organized and easy to maintain with a team, Marktwin might help. It lets you edit and review the Markdown in your GitHub repo together without moving it somewhere else. https://marktwin.com. Feedback gives me a good excuse to procrastinate and work on it. Is open source on GitHub.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just a stored prompt, you can attach re-useable scripts to them to offer more determinism. ex: a script that validates that a PR follows exactly the template you want, with a max of N lines per entry. The more determinism you have, the more consistent you can be and the more leverage you can build. (yes I understand that skill calls are non deterministic).
That's just a stored prompt that references a script :)
Yes, that's my point :)
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just a stored prompt, you can attach re-useable scripts to them to offer more determinism. ex: a script that validates that a PR follows exactly the template you want, with a max of N lines per entry. The more determinism you have, the more consistent you can be and the more leverage you can build. (yes I understand that skill calls are non deterministic).
We do that, but keep the scripts in the code and just tell them in the markdown where the scripts are, same with "references" (docs/) for us. It never made sense to me to put those in a skill dir, many are useful across skills and for humans (many written for humans before agents were a thing) One of the more interesting benefits to skills is that many harnesses now run the inline command(s) in backticks, shortcuttin…
+1 on all of this, it is similar to the pattern I see emerging as well. For example I have open-sourced (let's be honest, it's just my personal tooling of taste) a repo on gh to try and formalize these things. I'd rather not share out of mostly imposter syndrome but essentially it's a scaffolding tool ala "create-react-app" for the stack I generally use.
Part of that is to create standardized "docs/{architecture, decisions, contracts, operations}" folders that my harness recognizes in my repos to have a better sense of where was it.
Glad others are converging towards similar ideas!