31–40 of 239 posts
Thanks for this, going to steal a lot of this. I would install your plugin, but I worry about being able to delete it later. I also think that each one of these is better served customized to a developer. That said, I'm still going to grab some of these, thanks!
The best way to prompt an LLM is to describe the outcome you want, that's it. They are trained as task completers. A clear outcome is way better than a process. If the LLM fails, either you didn't describe your outcome sufficiently or is misinterpreted what you said or it couldn't do it (rare). Common errors should be encoded as context for future similar tasks, don't bloat skills with stuff that isn't shown to be ne…
> The best way to prompt an LLM is to describe the outcome you want, that's it. They are trained as task completers. A clear outcome is way better than a process. This is not true for anything complex. They’re instruction followers, of which task completion is just one facet. They’re also extremely eager to complete tasks without enough information, and do it wrongly. In the case of just describing task completion, d…
I was surprised how long some of these skills are. They are pages and pages long with tables and checkbox lists and code examples, etc. Curious how normal that is - it would only take a couple of these to really fill the context alot.
805 lines
660 lines
511 lines
The best way to prompt an LLM is to describe the outcome you want, that's it. They are trained as task completers. A clear outcome is way better than a process. If the LLM fails, either you didn't describe your outcome sufficiently or is misinterpreted what you said or it couldn't do it (rare). Common errors should be encoded as context for future similar tasks, don't bloat skills with stuff that isn't shown to be ne…
> This isn’t a coincidence. It’s the same SDLC every functioning engineering organisation runs, just in different vocabulary. [...] Amazon calls it the working-backwards memo and the bar raiser. Every healthy team has some version of this loop. This (sdlc == working backwards & bar raiser) is so horribly wrong, that I hope this was an LLM hallucination. In general, I'm starting to see these agent scaffolding systems…
The problem is it’s so rarely A/B tested, definitely not at scale. An engineer, who writes all these my-workflow-but-for-agents skills, proceeds to get the good outcome, while also seeing affirmations that the agent did follow the prescribed processes - that is considered a victory. In reality the outcome could’ve been just as good if they fed Claude a spec + acceptance criteria, or even a basic prompt for the simple…
But I don't expect anyone to every use my stuff. It's complicated as hell. But it's for me, and it works without me having to remotely think about the complexity.
I love that.
I was surprised how long some of these skills are. They are pages and pages long with tables and checkbox lists and code examples, etc. Curious how normal that is - it would only take a couple of these to really fill the context alot.
I have been successful with short and focused skills so far. I treat them as a reusable snippet of context, but small ones. For example a couple of paragraphs at most about how to use Python in my project and how to run unit tests. I also have several short "info" skills that don't actually provide the agent instructions, they merely contain useful contextual information that the agent can choose to pull in if needed.
Even having too many skills can be an issue because the list of skill names and their descriptions all end up in the context at some point.
Yep, benchmarks, comparisons of with/without, samples of generated code with/without. This kind of stuff matters, and you may be making your agent stupider or getting worse results without real analysis.
Also this prose reads like the author has drunk the Google kool-aid and not much else.
From an SEO/LLMO perspective, the discoverability of these skills will be difficult without a rename: https://agentskills.io/ If Addy reads this, how do you pitch this vs. Superpowers? https://github.com/obra/superpowers
I would love to know how many people are actually using superpowers. I showed up on the agentic dev scene prior to superpowers, and I am getting concerned that >50% of my self-rolled processes are now covered by superpowers. I no longer trust gh stars, can anyone chime in? Is superpowers now truly adopted? If it is truly valuable, why hasn't Boris integrated the concepts yet?
People were hyping up Oh My Opencode. When they realized it didn't lead to any significant gains in performance they hopped on the next thing.
And when the same thing happens to Superpowers it'll be something else they cling on because "this time it's different"
Cant wait for everyone to realize they've wasted a year + messing with agents and experiencing a feeling of psuedo productivity.