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Agent Skills

addyosmani.com

41–50 of 239 posts

Re: Agent Skills

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I just removed superpowers from my own setup. In my opinion, given the quality of the planning modes in both claude code and codex, superpowers was really just slowing things down and burning more tokens than vanilla.

anecdata, but I ended up in the same spot.

I used superpowers - but it burns waay more tokens for basically the same outcome as a single line that states

"Please do planning and ask any required questions before implementing.

[my prompt]"

On the latest models and with a decent harness, the planning modes are quite good, and the single sentence telling it to ask you questions lets the model pick the right thing to ask about, instead of wasting a bunch of time/tokens on predefined skills that try to force basically the same result.

It does introduce a second set of required interactions, but you can have another agent be your "questions answerer" if you need it (result quality goes down a bit vs answering myself, but still quite good, especially if you spend a bit of time on the answerer prompt)

Basically - things are moving fast enough I'm not convinced buying into superpowers/agentskills/[daily prompt magic beans]/etc tooling really makes sense.

I'd stick to the defaults in the harness for most cases, and then work on being clear with the ask.

Re: Agent Skills

#42
post #18

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 reviewed the line counts of my own project skill files, and the top 3 I have are: 805 lines 660 lines 511 lines Maybe I am _too_ conservative here. Lots to explore.

No, you aren't.

Re: Agent Skills

#45
I've tried these larger agent skillsets in the past and felt it was a waste of time because it was just doing too much. Just like vim it's often better to pick and choose from the community instead of installing skills like they are an IDE. Skills are way too personal because every dev and dev team is different. So better to treat these as a reference for your own config rather than bulk install someone else's config.

Re: Agent Skills

#46

Cant wait for everyone to realize they've wasted a year + messing with agents and experiencing a feeling of psuedo productivity.

You’ll get downvoted for this hearsay!

I think you mean heresy. But maybe I don't get the reference you're making when you say hearsay

Re: Agent Skills

#48
Why are people so excited to put themselves out of a job?

Not that these or any "skills" will do that, but just- in principle. This is like alienation from labor at scale.

Re: Agent Skills

#49
There’s so many ways, many redundant, to set up agents for software development that beyond personal/team/org needs+tastes, I need to look into setting up some benchmarks to evaluate what set up is optimal or whether the differences are even worth it.

Re: Agent Skills

#50
post #6

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

This is like creating a React framework called ReactJS to compete with NextJS
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