I have thought for a while now that skills were a bad abstraction. There's a lack of definition around what to use them for that I think contributed to why they rose to the top, but that's also why I think they aren't a good long term option.
The fact that I can have a skill that is just general guidance on front end design best practices that an agent can call upon whenever they feel, and another that is essentially a run book of steps that need to be followed exactly only when explicitly triggered, and a third that is basically just instructions on how to use a specific tool and all of those are acceptable just feels wrong to me. I get why it caught on and why the flexibility is attractive when the entire world is collectively learning a new tool, but skills have come to feel like the junk drawer in the kitchen where you just throw random shit when you don't want to think about a better place to put it.
I would love to see the world standardize on something like:
- Agents: Essentially personalities for a model to take on. This becomes the new place for skills like "front end expert" where you're not telling an agent to do a specific thing, just to think in a certain way about a task.
- Prompts: Repeatable instructions for specific tasks that an agent should follow when prompted. This could be something like a checklist style run book on how to resolve a certain error that an agent needs to follow exactly or it could be something like here's an idea I have for a new feature please poke holes in it.
- Tools: Tools (like CLIs, MCPs, or scripts) and instructions on how and when to use them. I'm purposefully not calling this skills because I think the term is overloaded, but that's kind of what this is.