Skills, plugins, apps, connectors, MCPs, agents - anyone else getting a bit lost?
All marketing names for APIs and prompts. IMO you don't need to even try to follow, because there's nothing inherently new or innovative about any of this.
Skills Officially Comes to Codex
31–40 of 133 posts
Re: Skills Officially Comes to Codex
#32What are your favourite skills?
A very particular set of skills.
Re: Skills Officially Comes to Codex
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps you could help me. I'm having a hard time figuring out how could I leverage skills in a medium size web application project. It's python, PostgreSQL, Django. Thanks in advance. I wonder if skills are more useful for non crud-like projects. Maybe data science and DevOps.
you could for example create a skill to access your database for testing purposes and pass in your tables specifications so that the agent can easily retrieve data for you on the fly.
Oooooo, woah, I didn't really "get it" thanks for spelling it out a bit, just thought of some crazy cool experiments I can run if that is true.
Re: Skills Officially Comes to Codex
#34one thing that I am missing from the specification is a way to inject specific variables into the skills. If I create let's say a postgres-skill, then I can either (1) provide the password on every skill execution or (2) hardcode the password into my script. To make this really useful there needs to be some kind of secret storage that the agent can read/write. This would also allow me as a programmer to sell the skil…
I have no clue how you’re running your agents or what you’re building, but giving the raw password string to a the model seems dubious?
Otherwise, why not just keep the password in an .env file, and state “grab the password from the .env file” in your Postgres skill?
Re: Skills Officially Comes to Codex
#35one thing that I am missing from the specification is a way to inject specific variables into the skills. If I create let's say a postgres-skill, then I can either (1) provide the password on every skill execution or (2) hardcode the password into my script. To make this really useful there needs to be some kind of secret storage that the agent can read/write. This would also allow me as a programmer to sell the skil…
> there needs to be some kind of secret storage that the agent can read/write
Why not the filesystem?
I would create a local file (e.g. .env) in each project using postgres, then in my postgres skill, tell the agent to check that file for credentials.
Re: Skills Officially Comes to Codex
#36Yes! I was raving about Claude Skills a few days ago (vide https://quesma.com/blog/claude-skills-not-antigravity/ ), and excited they come to Codex as well!
Thanks for that! You mentioned Antigravity seemed slow, I just started playing with it too (but not really given it a good go yet to really evaluate) but I had the model set to Gemini Flash, maybe you get a speed up if you do that?
Re: Skills Officially Comes to Codex
#37Skills, plugins, apps, connectors, MCPs, agents - anyone else getting a bit lost?
It's like JS frameworks. Just wait until a React emerges and get up to speed with that later.
Re: Skills Officially Comes to Codex
#38It's so nice that skills are becoming a standard, they are imo a much bigger deal long-term than e.g. MCP. Easy to author (at its most basic, just a markdown file), context efficient by default (only preloads yaml front-matter, can lazy load more markdown files as needed), can piggyback on top of existing tooling (for instance, instead of the GitHub MCP, you just make a skill describing how to use the `gh` cli). Comp…
Perhaps you could help me. I'm having a hard time figuring out how could I leverage skills in a medium size web application project. It's python, PostgreSQL, Django. Thanks in advance. I wonder if skills are more useful for non crud-like projects. Maybe data science and DevOps.
Skills are the matrix scene where neo learns kungfu. Imagine they are a database of specialized knowledge that can an agent can instantly tap into _on demand_.
The key here is “on demand”. Not every agent or convention needs to know kung fu. But when they do, a skill is waiting to be consumed. This basic idea is “progressive disclosure” and it composes nicely to keep context windows focused. Eg i have a metabase skill to query analytics. Within that I conditionally refer to how to generate authentication if they arent authenticated. If they are authenticated, that information need not be consumed.
Some practical “skills”: writing tests, fetching sentry info, using playwright (a lot of local mcps are just flat out replaced by skills), submitting a PR according to team conventions (eg run lint, review code for X, title matches format, etc)
Re: Skills Officially Comes to Codex
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure. Verifiability is far-fetched. But say I want to produce a statistically significant evaluation result from this – essentially testing a piece of prose. How do I go about this, short of relying on a vague LLM-as-a-judge metric? What are the parameters?
Would a structured skills file format help you evaluate the results more?
Yes. It would make it much easier to evaluate results if the input contents were parameterized and normalized to some agreed-upon structure.
Not to mention the advantages it would present for iteration and improvement.
Re: Skills Officially Comes to Codex
#40one thing that I am missing from the specification is a way to inject specific variables into the skills. If I create let's say a postgres-skill, then I can either (1) provide the password on every skill execution or (2) hardcode the password into my script. To make this really useful there needs to be some kind of secret storage that the agent can read/write. This would also allow me as a programmer to sell the skil…
I have no clue how you’re running your agents or what you’re building, but giving the raw password string to a the model seems dubious? Otherwise, why not just keep the password in an .env file, and state “grab the password from the .env file” in your Postgres skill?
I am thinking of distributing skills that I build to my clients. As my clients are mostly non-technical users I need this process of distribution to be as easy as possible. Even adding a .env file would probably be too much for most of them. With skills I can now finally distribute my logic easily, just send the raw files and tell them to put it into a folder - done. But there is no easy way for them to "setup" the credentials in those skills yet. The best UX in my opinion would be for Codex (or Claude, doesn't matter) to ask for those setup-parameters once when first using the skill and process the inputs in a secure manner, i.e. some internal secret storage