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A Claude Code and Codex Skill for Deliberate Skill Development

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Re: A Claude Code and Codex Skill for Deliberate Skill Development

#31

Post by rglover »

For those who haven't gone down this rabbit hole like me yet: skills are just structured markdown files that describe how to handle a narrow-band task.

So, if I write my API endpoints a certain way, the skill would describe that specific process. Later, an agent can "see" this skill, load it when it's relevant to current chat context, and then do whatever is instructed.

Similar to "tool calls," but instead of being a function you can call, it's just instructions for how to perform that "skill."

At least for the agent I use (Cline), you can define skills either globally or locally (project level).

Re: A Claude Code and Codex Skill for Deliberate Skill Development

#33

Post by giwook »

aplthrowaway67 wrote: post #24

I will never understand why someone would go through all the trouble of developing this cool idea, without bothering to link a demo or include sample output. I see this every day on HN. So the only way I can see what this skill actually looks like is to download and run it myself? No thank you.

The SKILL.md is right there, you can just read it to see what it does.

Re: A Claude Code and Codex Skill for Deliberate Skill Development

#34

Post by jonaseriksen »

neuralkoi wrote: post #7

I'm not familiar with Skills, but looking at the repo I find the amount of decorative code/text as overkill for what amounts to just the following prompt in a bash script (yikes) executing after a commit is run: {"hookSpecificOutput":{"hookEventName":"PostToolUse","additionalContext":"[learning-opportunities-auto] The user just committed code. Per the learning-opportunities skill, consider whether this is a good mome…

[flagged]

Re: A Claude Code and Codex Skill for Deliberate Skill Development

#35

Post by wiseowise »

zihotki wrote: post #6

No benchmarks and evals present, how do you know it produces better result than /create-skill ? Naive testing doesn't provide any confidence

When your brain is so cooked on LLMs that mentioning any related terminology triggers Pavlovian response.

Re: A Claude Code and Codex Skill for Deliberate Skill Development

#36

Post by alexhans »

skinfaxi wrote: post #30
alexhans wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skills are just a good standard to describe repeatable workflows saving context through progressive disclosure, prompt sharing and, very underused feature, also bound the non deterministic parts with determism (which could be scripts). Conceptually, you should treat them as incremental software instead of magic you grab from others [1] The killer feature is that coding harnesses tend to have SkillBuilder agent skills…

After reading your first article I'm not sure I would agree. Skills are certainly transferrable in the sense that a sufficiently narrowly-tailored skill can be applicable for others with no modification. Similar to how we grab libraries that encapsulate certain abstractions for us.

Sorry. I'm not sure about the specific part you don't agree with. You prefer people to just use skills instead of building them?

That's fair but I think this is similar to power tools like vim, obsidian or others. There's the path of grabbing other people's workflows and not being able to modify them to really tailor the tool to your needs and there's the minimal incremental path that empowers you and gives you control all the way through. It gets you to understand the tools and you'll be able to think possibilities that match your exact problems.

I'm not dogmatic about it but I do really recommend it. You can see the transformative shift once people start "skill building" instead of "skill consuming".

Edit: The approach I mention works with non engineers/developers. So there's no different technical bar.

Re: A Claude Code and Codex Skill for Deliberate Skill Development

#39

Post by testycool »

giwook wrote: post #33
aplthrowaway67 wrote: post #24

I will never understand why someone would go through all the trouble of developing this cool idea, without bothering to link a demo or include sample output. I see this every day on HN. So the only way I can see what this skill actually looks like is to download and run it myself? No thank you.

The SKILL.md is right there, you can just read it to see what it does.

A sample output will give the user an idea of whether the project is worth their time.

Re: A Claude Code and Codex Skill for Deliberate Skill Development

#40

Post by pisama »

neuralkoi wrote: post #7

I'm not familiar with Skills, but looking at the repo I find the amount of decorative code/text as overkill for what amounts to just the following prompt in a bash script (yikes) executing after a commit is run: {"hookSpecificOutput":{"hookEventName":"PostToolUse","additionalContext":"[learning-opportunities-auto] The user just committed code. Per the learning-opportunities skill, consider whether this is a good mome…

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