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Agent Skills

addyosmani.com

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Re: Agent Skills

#111

Post by raincole »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #75
ai_fry_ur_brain wrote: post #39

Cant wait for everyone to realize they've wasted a year + messing with agents and experiencing a feeling of psuedo productivity.

I’m a bit curious with these takes. Arguing in good faith - is the general assumption that people who use AI/agents/harnesses don’t ship features? We’ve been all in Claude Code since ~Septemberish, and have been able to successfully track the boost. Like the features that we ship that get used in production. Both from infrastructure side, and business logic implementations. Frontend and backend. I don’t think people…

You're replying to an account specifically created to post inflammable AI takes (likely a bot anyway). So your attempt

> Arguing in good faith

will be futile, unfortunately.

Re: Agent Skills

#112

Post by Lio »

“A senior engineer’s job is mostly the parts that don’t show up in the diff.”

Agent Skills is Addy’s attempt to kill that job too. Cheers Addy. :P

Re: Agent Skills

#114

Post by lionkor »

stellalo wrote: post #87

> A skill is a markdown file with frontmatter that gets injected into the agent’s context when the situation calls for it. When the LLM decides that the situation calls for it > It is a workflow: a sequence of steps the agent follows, with checkpoints that produce evidence, ending in a defined exit criterion. A sequence of steps the LLM can decide to follow

Well, to be fair, in e.g. Codex you can invoke a skill directly, with $my-skill, and this WILL lead to the skill being injected into the context. At that point, the LLM follows the skill as well as it follows any other part of the prompt, instructions, or context.

Re: Agent Skills

#115

Post by [deleted] »

cortesoft wrote: post #84
ai_fry_ur_brain wrote: post #39

Cant wait for everyone to realize they've wasted a year + messing with agents and experiencing a feeling of psuedo productivity.

I can understand skepticism to a degree, and even fundamentally believing that AI is bad for all sorts of reasons, but I am becoming more and more perplexed at the certainty behind statements like this one. How are you so certain that AI development is this doomed? It just hasn't matched my experience at all, and I wonder what your experience is that has driven you to this level of certainty about the certain doom of…

[deleted]

Re: Agent Skills

#116

Post by sunaookami »

dmix wrote: post #45

I've tried these larger agent skillsets in the past and felt it was a waste of time because it was just doing too much. Just like vim it's often better to pick and choose from the community instead of installing skills like they are an IDE. Skills are way too personal because every dev and dev team is different. So better to treat these as a reference for your own config rather than bulk install someone else's config…

Same for MCPs and system instructions, there are a lot of people that just install everything without understanding it, cluttering their context, wasting >50k tokens for these tools they don't need and then complain that they need to pay >100$ per month because they reach their limits too fast.

Re: Agent Skills

#117

Post by vidarh »

kaashif wrote: post #106
vidarh wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans also drop any hard requirements you specify regularly, and similarly require review. Nevertheless we manage to increase reliability of human output through processes and reviews, and most of the methods we use for harnesses are taken from experience with how to reduce reliability issues in humans, who are notoriously difficult to ensure delivers reliably.

The primary way to increase reliability is to automate. Instead of humans producing some output manually, humans producing machines which produce that output. I've seen a disturbing trend where a process that could've been a script or a requirement that could've been enforced deterministically is in fact "automated" through a set of instructions for an LLM.

Sure, when that is possible. However, there are lots of processes we don't know how to automate in a deterministic way. Hence the vast amount of investment in building organisations of people with mechanism to make peoples output more reliable through structure, reviews, and so on.

Large parts of human civilization rests on our ability to make something unreliable less unreliable through organisational structure and processes.

Re: Agent Skills

#118

Post by rafaelmn »

> It’s people accepting plausible-sounding justifications for skipping the parts they don’t feel like doing.

WTF ? Almost always this was "skipping the parts because the deadline was 2 weeks ago". The "I don't feel like it" rationalizations are maybe 20% ? Unless deadlines are rationalizations too ?

Re: Agent Skills

#119

Post by shruubi »

Am I the only one who looks at guys like Addy Osmani and Steve Yegge who before LLM's had a good reputation and since then get the feeling they are cashing that reputation in to ride the LLM hype-cycle? Or is it just a matter of professional tech talking heads moving from writing books and giving conference talks about good engineering practices to talking about the new hot topic that sells books and conference tickets?

Re: Agent Skills

#120

Post by simianwords »

The fundamental problem with agent skills is that it doesn’t have a hook to do one time installation. An agent can’t just be a prompt. It also has to have some way to do initial set up work.

If I have an agent skill to look up prices of stocks, maybe I need to set up some tools and authentication first. There’s no way to express this!

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