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Agent Skills
11–20 of 239 posts
Re: Agent Skills
#12From an SEO/LLMO perspective, the discoverability of these skills will be difficult without a rename: https://agentskills.io/ If Addy reads this, how do you pitch this vs. Superpowers? https://github.com/obra/superpowers
I would love to know how many people are actually using superpowers. I showed up on the agentic dev scene prior to superpowers, and I am getting concerned that >50% of my self-rolled processes are now covered by superpowers. I no longer trust gh stars, can anyone chime in? Is superpowers now truly adopted? If it is truly valuable, why hasn't Boris integrated the concepts yet?
I just removed superpowers from my own setup. In my opinion, given the quality of the planning modes in both claude code and codex, superpowers was really just slowing things down and burning more tokens than vanilla.
Re: Agent Skills
#13Naming things is such a hard problem that many devs don't even bother trying.
That being said, this post is full of reasonable assertions, so I'm looking forward to experimenting with this... whatever it is.
Re: Agent Skills
#14The best way to prompt an LLM is to describe the outcome you want, that's it. They are trained as task completers. A clear outcome is way better than a process.
If the LLM fails, either you didn't describe your outcome sufficiently or is misinterpreted what you said or it couldn't do it (rare).
Common errors should be encoded as context for future similar tasks, don't bloat skills with stuff that isn't shown to be necessary.
Re: Agent Skills
#15From an SEO/LLMO perspective, the discoverability of these skills will be difficult without a rename: https://agentskills.io/ If Addy reads this, how do you pitch this vs. Superpowers? https://github.com/obra/superpowers
Does superpowers actually work? The main skill file doesn't inspire much confidence:
"If you think there is even a 1% chance a skill might apply to what you are doing, you ABSOLUTELY MUST invoke the skill."Re: Agent Skills
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would love to know how many people are actually using superpowers. I showed up on the agentic dev scene prior to superpowers, and I am getting concerned that >50% of my self-rolled processes are now covered by superpowers. I no longer trust gh stars, can anyone chime in? Is superpowers now truly adopted? If it is truly valuable, why hasn't Boris integrated the concepts yet?
I just removed superpowers from my own setup. In my opinion, given the quality of the planning modes in both claude code and codex, superpowers was really just slowing things down and burning more tokens than vanilla.
Thank you for the data point.
To give back as much as I can, I use the two built-in CC review processes when appropriate. But, those only do "is this PR good code?"
Far too late did I finally roll my own custom review skill that tests: "does this PR accomplish what the specs required?"
If I could ask for one more vanilla CC skill, it might be that. However, maybe rolling your own repo-aware skill via prompt is better?
Re: Agent Skills
#17> This isn’t a coincidence. It’s the same SDLC every functioning engineering organisation runs, just in different vocabulary. [...] Amazon calls it the working-backwards memo and the bar raiser. Every healthy team has some version of this loop. This (sdlc == working backwards & bar raiser) is so horribly wrong, that I hope this was an LLM hallucination. In general, I'm starting to see these agent scaffolding systems…
The problem is it’s so rarely A/B tested, definitely not at scale. An engineer, who writes all these my-workflow-but-for-agents skills, proceeds to get the good outcome, while also seeing affirmations that the agent did follow the prescribed processes - that is considered a victory. In reality the outcome could’ve been just as good if they fed Claude a spec + acceptance criteria, or even a basic prompt for the simpler tasks.
Re: Agent Skills
#18I was surprised how long some of these skills are. They are pages and pages long with tables and checkbox lists and code examples, etc.
Curious how normal that is - it would only take a couple of these to really fill the context alot.
Re: Agent Skills
#19> This isn’t a coincidence. It’s the same SDLC every functioning engineering organisation runs, just in different vocabulary. [...] Amazon calls it the working-backwards memo and the bar raiser. Every healthy team has some version of this loop. This (sdlc == working backwards & bar raiser) is so horribly wrong, that I hope this was an LLM hallucination. In general, I'm starting to see these agent scaffolding systems…
This is how similarly we collectively approach Taylorism, isn't it? However, the world favors capitalism, of which Taylorism becomes a handy scaffolding.
Re: Agent Skills
#20The best way to prompt an LLM is to describe the outcome you want, that's it. They are trained as task completers. A clear outcome is way better than a process. If the LLM fails, either you didn't describe your outcome sufficiently or is misinterpreted what you said or it couldn't do it (rare). Common errors should be encoded as context for future similar tasks, don't bloat skills with stuff that isn't shown to be ne…
I agree that many skills are overblown and unnecessary. But there's a lot of value in giving AI the right process. See how much more effective Claude can be for moderate or large changes when using the superpowers skill.