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Agent Skills

addyosmani.com

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Re: Agent Skills

#201

Post by ai_fry_ur_brain »

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…

Features no one asked for and weren't important enough to invest in previously, probably not that valuable.

Re: Agent Skills

#202

Post by ai_fry_ur_brain »

vidarh wrote: post #172
adyavanapalli wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the numbers you are getting?

Initial drop, as people learn to use the tools, and while they keep babysitting their harnesses. Then significant boost once people start getting used to running the agents in the background, especially once they start running multiple sessions in parallel. I'd say you need a ~6 month push of getting people trained if they are not used to this way of working, and to customised setups etc. for your organisation, and t…

Was there previously huge backlog of work to do, or are you just building tons features for the hell of it because you can?

Re: Agent Skills

#203

Post by ninininino »

ai_fry_ur_brain wrote: post #199
cortesoft wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I dont know any serious engineers thay are doing real work with AI agents. I know some that are building features for web applications and just punching a clock, but I don't think that constitutes real work or provides much value to the world. I like thinking, solving problems and typing out code myself. Im going to keep putting tons of care into my craft and I promise I'll have more impact than the guy running 3 age…

it's fascinating that you imagine that building features for web applications is never "real work".

Re: Agent Skills

#204

Post by [deleted] »

ninininino wrote: post #203
ai_fry_ur_brain wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont know any serious engineers thay are doing real work with AI agents. I know some that are building features for web applications and just punching a clock, but I don't think that constitutes real work or provides much value to the world. I like thinking, solving problems and typing out code myself. Im going to keep putting tons of care into my craft and I promise I'll have more impact than the guy running 3 age…

it's fascinating that you imagine that building features for web applications is never "real work".

[deleted]

Re: Agent Skills

#205

Post by ai_fry_ur_brain »

ninininino wrote: post #203
ai_fry_ur_brain wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont know any serious engineers thay are doing real work with AI agents. I know some that are building features for web applications and just punching a clock, but I don't think that constitutes real work or provides much value to the world. I like thinking, solving problems and typing out code myself. Im going to keep putting tons of care into my craft and I promise I'll have more impact than the guy running 3 age…

it's fascinating that you imagine that building features for web applications is never "real work".

It is real work, just 90% of it is either net negative for society or provides nuetral value. Most web applications that are piling on features now because they have agents, are piling on features that we never needed in the first place, hence why they weren't prioritized previously. Junk junk junk.

Re: Agent Skills

#206

Post by ai_fry_ur_brain »

bot403 wrote: post #76
tokioyoyo wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ignore the people who haven't found out how to use ai yet or don't want to. AI is a powerful tool. Depending on what I need I use chatgpt, in-ide agents, or a platform like Devin.ai. I use it when it helps me advance my goals. I don't when it doesn't. Sometimes it misses the mark and I scale back and have it do a specific piece and I'll do the rest. Sometimes I use it to analyze the code base in seconds vs minutes. S…

You are a bot lol

Re: Agent Skills

#207

Post by peterbell_nyc »

wg0 wrote: post #68

Snake oil. Good to read for sure. Seems all plausible too. But snake oil nevertheless. Here's why: The slot machine can drop any hard requirement that you specifically in your AGENTS.md, memory.md or your dozens of skill markdowns. Pretty much guaranteed. These harnesses approaches pretend as if LLMs are strict and perfect rule followers and the only problem is not being able to specify enough rules clearly enough. T…

Helps if you both hand to original agent as strong guidance and then to an adversarial agent as a quality reviewer. The adversarial agent is more likely tro loop the work back if it fails the validation criteria.

I do find that just asking the same agent to do and check it's own work is not particularly reliable.

Re: Agent Skills

#208

Post by theshrike79 »

cortesoft wrote: post #85
thatmf wrote: post #48

Why are people so excited to put themselves out of a job? Not that these or any "skills" will do that, but just- in principle. This is like alienation from labor at scale.

I don't understand this thinking as a computer programmer. My whole life has been about getting a computer to do work so humans don't have to anymore. Every single piece of software written is supposed to take away work from someone. Do you feel this way about every automation you create? I do know some old school sys admins who felt this way about a lot of infrastructure automation advancements, and didn't like that…

The problem is that people are holding AI wrong. They're using AI as the engine of their solution without realising the true solution:

Use AI to create the engine. After that running the engine itself costs as much as keeping the computer running it online. No API costs for 3rd party LLM providers needed.

Re: Agent Skills

#209

Post by theshrike79 »

koliber wrote: post #69

Lately I keep hearing the same thing over and over: the things that are good for managing a team of devs are good for LLMs. Good test cases. Clear and concise documentation. CI/CD. Best practices and onboarding docs. Managing LLMs is becoming more and more similar to managing teams of people.

Yep, I've been saying this for about a year now. Actually gave a presentation on this internally with this exact anecdote :D

There are so many bad analogies I could use to describe it, but they're all bad so I won't try.

Re: Agent Skills

#210

Post by theshrike79 »

tempoponet wrote: post #77
koliber wrote: post #69

Lately I keep hearing the same thing over and over: the things that are good for managing a team of devs are good for LLMs. Good test cases. Clear and concise documentation. CI/CD. Best practices and onboarding docs. Managing LLMs is becoming more and more similar to managing teams of people.

Similarly, the agentic coding success stories are from orgs that had all of these things out of the gate.

Or had the sense to build the guidelines without trying to rely on writing fanfiction to guide the LLM.
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