51–60 of 212 posts
If your goal is to always give a permanent knowledge base to your agent that's exactly what AGENTS.md is for...
I'm a bit confused by their claims. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding how Skills should work. But from what I know (and the small experience I had with them), skills are meant to be specifications for niche and well defined areas of work (i.e. building the project, running custom pipelines etc.) If your goal is to always give a permanent knowledge base to your agent that's exactly what AGENTS.md is for...
I guess you need to make sure your file paths are self-explanatory and fairly unique, otherwise the agent might bring extra documentation into the context trying to find which file had what it needed?
It's barely readable to humans, but directly and efficiently relevant to LLM's (direct reference -> referent, without language verbiage).
This suggests some (compressed) index format that is always loaded into context will replace heuristics around agents.md/claude.md/skills.md.
So I would bet this year we get some normalization of both the indexes and the referenced documentation (esp. matching terms).
Possibly also a side issue: API's could repurpose their test suites as validation to compare LLM performance of code tasks.
LLM's create huge adoption waves. Libraries/API's will have to learn to surf them or be limited to usage by humans.
What if instead of needing to run a codemod to cache per-lib docs locally, documentation could be distributed alongside a given lib, as a dev dependency, version locked, and accessible locally as plaintext. All docs can be linked in node_modules/.docs (like binaries are in .bin). It would be a sort of collection of manuals. What a wonderful world that would be.
I'm not sure if this is widely known but you can do a lot better even than AGENTS.md. Create a folder called .context and symlink anything in there that is relevant to the project. For example READMEs and important docs from dependencies you're using. Then configure your tool to always read .context into context, just like it does for AGENTS.md. This ensures the LLM has all the information it needs right in context f…
Isn't it obvious that an agent will do better if he internalizes the knowledge on something instead of having the option to request it? Skills are new. Models haven't been trained on them yet. Give it 2 months.
Not so obvious, because the model still needs to look up the required doc. The article glances over this detail a little bit unfortunately. The model needs to decide when to use a skill, but doesn’t it also need to decide when to look up documentation instead of relying on pretraining data?
Am I missing something here? Obviously directly including context in something like a system prompt will put it in context 100% of the time. You could just as easily take all of an agent's skills, feed it to the agent (in a system prompt, or similar) and it will follow the instructions more reliably. However, at a certain point you have to use skills, because including it in the context every time is wasteful, or not…
Which makes sense.
& some numbers that prove that.
I'm not sure if this is widely known but you can do a lot better even than AGENTS.md. Create a folder called .context and symlink anything in there that is relevant to the project. For example READMEs and important docs from dependencies you're using. Then configure your tool to always read .context into context, just like it does for AGENTS.md. This ensures the LLM has all the information it needs right in context f…