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Agent Skills

addyosmani.com

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Re: Agent Skills

#211

Post by [deleted] »

kiba wrote: post #167
H8crilA wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am so much faster with the bots. If you're not faster with the bots then either you write very very little code, or you're doing it very wrong. Tactically they outsmart me 10-100x if you account for the write speed. Even if you just consider the knowledge of languages, libraries, patterns they clearly outperform me. Strategically I do not trust them at all, poor things suck at it, mainly because they always try to…

Wake me up when LLMs help me write better code and let me understand the codebase, and not before. Not faster, not more productive, but a more comprehensible codebase that I can reason in my own head. Otherwise, if they write so much better code, than it's pointless to have a human in the loop.

[deleted]

Re: Agent Skills

#212

Post by H8crilA »

kiba wrote: post #167
H8crilA wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am so much faster with the bots. If you're not faster with the bots then either you write very very little code, or you're doing it very wrong. Tactically they outsmart me 10-100x if you account for the write speed. Even if you just consider the knowledge of languages, libraries, patterns they clearly outperform me. Strategically I do not trust them at all, poor things suck at it, mainly because they always try to…

Wake me up when LLMs help me write better code and let me understand the codebase, and not before. Not faster, not more productive, but a more comprehensible codebase that I can reason in my own head. Otherwise, if they write so much better code, than it's pointless to have a human in the loop.

You will develop quite a lot of illnesses sleeping for this long, but your choice I suppose. Who knows, maybe it happens as soon as next year. I would strongly suggest living a life, any life really, instead of waiting like that.

Re: Agent Skills

#213

Post by intended »

vidarh wrote: post #197
intended wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Liability, penalties, trust, and responsibility are means we use to try to influence the application of the processes that do. They do not directly affect reliability. They can be applied just as much to a team using AI as one that does not. Yes and no. see next point. > You can ask the same thing about all the supporting staff around the experts in your team. I have a good idea of the shape of errors for a human b…

> (there is no singular thread behind my comment. I think we probably have more in agreement than not, and its more a question of finding the precise words to declare the shapes we perceive.) I moved this up top, because I agree, despite the length of the below: > However, the current hype cycle has created expectations of reliability from LLMs that drive 'Automated Intelligence' styled workflows. Because for a lot o…

> Because for a lot of things it works. Today. I have a setup

> There needs to be a rigorous process behind it, and I think we'll agree on that too.

I would simplify it to: “I have a setup” is the part that is doing the actual heavy lifting.

From my very unscientific survey / extensive pestering of network, the only people getting lift out of AI are people with both domain expertise/experience and familiarity with the tooling.

The types of automation I see people wanting though are fully automated customer support systems, fully automated document review - essentially white collar dark factories. (Hey thats a good term). The need is for a process that is stable, and behaves the same way every time.

It seems actual AI use cases are more like sketching - if you have enough skill you can make out the rough sketch is unbalanced and won’t resolve into a good final piece. Non experts spend far more time exploring dead ends because they don’t have the experience.

In my opinion, it’s a force multiplier for experts or stable processes, and it’s presented as Intelligence.

I feel your examples fit within these boundaries as well as the ones you have described.

Re: Agent Skills

#214

Post by moomin »

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…

This is like saying a +5 sword is useless because you still miss on a one. We’ve got to think about expected outcomes. Because if ahe’s merging five solid PRs to your three, loudly complaining about the one she saw was rubbish and threw away.

Re: Agent Skills

#215

Post by selimthegrim »

kergonath wrote: post #161
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…

> 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. Indeed. That said, I’ve had some success with agent skills, but I use them to make the LLM aware of things it can do using specific external tools. I think it is a really bad idea to use this mechanism to enforce safety rules. We need good sandboxing for this,…

Do you have any information on skills you've found useful here?

Re: Agent Skills

#216

Post by bsoles »

Agent skills are ways of turning over our means of (software) production to our employers, while making ourselves obsolete at the same time. In the recent past, a (software) professional had to be continuously employed by their employer to maintain access to their professional skills. By transferring our skills into AI agent skills, we are basically giving away that privilege. In the near future, our employers might feel they don't need our skills anymore because it has already been captured by the AI agents. Somebody with a better grasp of economic history should be able to explain this using the analogy of what happened during industrial revolution and how the workers got screwed over.

Re: Agent Skills

#217

Post by j45 »

kergonath wrote: post #182
j45 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a human articulation problem. When it receives a generic vague input it is free to interpret according to how its corpus fires like any human interaction. How to articulate better is like writing a sentence that will stand the test of model updates.

Even then. I don’t have an example off the top of my head but even perfectly clear sentences can lead the agent to strange places. Even between humans, miscommunication is easy, but then anyone sensible would ask for confirmation if their interpretation is weird. But the LLM very rarely questions the user. I don’t think it’s fair to blame the user here. The tool must be operated by normal users.

I'm trying to think of other types of tooling that normal users can all use equally well, or in the best ways possible.

Re: Agent Skills

#218

Post by kiba »

H8crilA wrote: post #212
kiba wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wake me up when LLMs help me write better code and let me understand the codebase, and not before. Not faster, not more productive, but a more comprehensible codebase that I can reason in my own head. Otherwise, if they write so much better code, than it's pointless to have a human in the loop.

You will develop quite a lot of illnesses sleeping for this long, but your choice I suppose. Who knows, maybe it happens as soon as next year. I would strongly suggest living a life, any life really, instead of waiting like that.

I use LLM, extensively in fact. I just don't see the value in using the LLMs the way people are using it right now.

Re: Agent Skills

#219

Post by cortesoft »

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…

You really don't know any serious engineers using AI for real projects? Donald Knuth himself has written about his success using AI to solve long standing problems he has been interested in. I dont know if there is anyone more deserving of the "serious engineer" label than him.

I personally know of very serious AI projects running at some of the biggest, most successful tech companies in the world. These aren't "another version of a web concept", they are serious projects solving serious problems.

There are all sorts of valid criticisms about AI, but you aren't making them.

Re: Agent Skills

#220

Post by applex1025 »

kiba wrote: post #62
dewey wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because usually the people who lose their jobs are people who do not adapt to the market. Right now it's not clear in which direction everything is involving and that's why people experiment with handing all their data to random agents, figuring out how to store and access context, re-use prompts and other attempts to harness this tech. Most of these will maybe be useless in a year as they might be deeply integrated…

People are building bots to do the most legible thing possible which is feature in X amount of time. But it doesn't matter if the bottleneck is human thinking time required to output quality code rather than X amount of code written.

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