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Agent Skills

addyosmani.com

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Re: Agent Skills

#81

Post by swyx »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #75
ai_fry_ur_brain wrote: post #39

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

I’m a bit curious with these takes. Arguing in good faith - is the general assumption that people who use AI/agents/harnesses don’t ship features? We’ve been all in Claude Code since ~Septemberish, and have been able to successfully track the boost. Like the features that we ship that get used in production. Both from infrastructure side, and business logic implementations. Frontend and backend. I don’t think people…

> have been able to successfully track the boost.

lets get nitty gritty on this - can you say how you did this? because a lot of people think this is an unsolved problem

Re: Agent Skills

#82

Post by wg0 »

cortesoft wrote: post #78
wg0 wrote: post #68

Snake oil. Good to read for sure. Seems all plausible too. But snake oil nevertheless. Here's why: The slot machine can drop any hard requirement that you specifically in your AGENTS.md, memory.md or your dozens of skill markdowns. Pretty much guaranteed. These harnesses approaches pretend as if LLMs are strict and perfect rule followers and the only problem is not being able to specify enough rules clearly enough. T…

Everything you say is all possible, and in theory I agree with you. However, I have been using spec-kit (which is basically this style of AI usage) for the last few months and it has been AMAZING in practice. I am building really great things and have not run into any of the issues you are talking about as hypotheticals. Could they eventually happen? Sure, maybe. I am still cautious. But at some point once you have p…

We can build all the scaffolding around but I assure you that the LLMs aren't perfect rule following machines is the fundamental problem here and that would remain.

Give it a few more months and I'm sure you'll see some of what I see if not all.

I'm saying all the above having all sorts of systems tried and tested with AI leading me to say what I said.

Re: Agent Skills

#83

Post by wg0 »

ai_fry_ur_brain wrote: post #39

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

This will be another Microservices moment in our industry.

Re: Agent Skills

#84

Post by cortesoft »

ai_fry_ur_brain wrote: post #39

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

I can understand skepticism to a degree, and even fundamentally believing that AI is bad for all sorts of reasons, but I am becoming more and more perplexed at the certainty behind statements like this one. How are you so certain that AI development is this doomed? It just hasn't matched my experience at all, and I wonder what your experience is that has driven you to this level of certainty about the certain doom of AI coding?

Is it just a philosophical belief that AI is morally bad? Or have you actually used AI to build things and feel confident that you have explored the space enough to come to such a strong conclusion?

I have been writing code every day for over 30 years, and have been doing it professionally for over 20. I have seen fads come and go, and I have seen real developments that have changed the way I do what I do numerous times. The more experience and the more projects I create with AI, the more certain I am that this is a lasting and fundamental change to how we produce software, and how we use computers generally. I have seen AI get better, and I have seen myself get more proficient at using it to get real work done, work that has already been tested with real world, production, workloads.

You can hate that it is happening, and hate the way working with AI feels, but that doesn't mean it is not providing real value for people and doing real work.

Re: Agent Skills

#85

Post by cortesoft »

thatmf wrote: post #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.

I don't understand this thinking as a computer programmer. My whole life has been about getting a computer to do work so humans don't have to anymore. Every single piece of software written is supposed to take away work from someone.

Do you feel this way about every automation you create? I do know some old school sys admins who felt this way about a lot of infrastructure automation advancements, and didn't like that we were creating scripts and systems to do the work that used to be done by hand. My team created an automated patching system at a job that would automatically run patching across our 30,000 servers, taking systems in and out of production autonomously, allowing the entire process to be hands free. We used to have a team whose full time job was running that process manually. Did we take their jobs by automating it?

Sure, in a sense. But there was other work that needed to be done, and now they could do it.

The whole reason I like programming and computers and technology is precisely because it does things for us so we don't have to do it. My utopia is robots doing all the hard work so humans can do whatever we want. AI is bringing us one step closer to that, and I would rather focus on trying to figure out how we can make sure the whole world can benefit from robots taking our jobs (and not just the rich owners), rather than focus on trying to make sure we leave enough work for humans to stay busy doing shit they don't actually want to do.

Re: Agent Skills

#86

Post by cortesoft »

wg0 wrote: post #82
cortesoft wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything you say is all possible, and in theory I agree with you. However, I have been using spec-kit (which is basically this style of AI usage) for the last few months and it has been AMAZING in practice. I am building really great things and have not run into any of the issues you are talking about as hypotheticals. Could they eventually happen? Sure, maybe. I am still cautious. But at some point once you have p…

We can build all the scaffolding around but I assure you that the LLMs aren't perfect rule following machines is the fundamental problem here and that would remain. Give it a few more months and I'm sure you'll see some of what I see if not all. I'm saying all the above having all sorts of systems tried and tested with AI leading me to say what I said.

I have been doing this for 6 months or so now, and I am not sure that even if you have a lot more experience than me that it would make your assessment more accurate, since that just means you have more experience with prior generations of the models. What I have experienced is that the AI has been getting better and better, and is making fewer and fewer mistakes.

Now, part of that is my advancements as well, as I learn how to specify my instructions to the AI and how to see in advance where the AI might have issues, but the advancements are also happening in the models themselves. They are just getting better, and rapidly.

The combination of getting better at steering the AI along with the AI itself getting better is leading me to the opposite conclusion you have. I have production systems that I wrote using spec-kit, that have been running in production for months, and have been doing spectacularly. I have been able to consistently add the new features that I need to, without losing any cohesion or adherence to the principals i have defined. Now, are there mistakes? Of course, but nothing that can't be caught and fixed, and not at a higher rate than traditional programming.

Re: Agent Skills

#87

Post by stellalo »

> A skill is a markdown file with frontmatter that gets injected into the agent’s context when the situation calls for it.

When the LLM decides that the situation calls for it

> It is a workflow: a sequence of steps the agent follows, with checkpoints that produce evidence, ending in a defined exit criterion.

A sequence of steps the LLM can decide to follow

Re: Agent Skills

#88

Post by rossant »

petesergeant wrote: post #67
theahura wrote: post #60

I really wish he wouldn't use AI to write his posts. It would be faster to just post the prompt he used to write the article

I wish this fucking meme of "post the prompt" would die. Very little work is one-shotted, very little has a singular "the prompt", most is iterated until it's close to the vision of what the author actually set out to write.

Exactly. Glad to see someone else articulate this so clearly.

Re: Agent Skills

#89

Post by tariky »

What is difference between superpowers and this?

I use superpowers for several months now and it really does help. But still 90/10 rule applies, 10% of time it will produce stupid decision. So always check spec.

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