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Agent Skills

addyosmani.com

91–100 of 239 posts

Re: Agent Skills

#91

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…

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Re: Agent Skills

#92
post #82

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.

> LLMs aren't perfect rule following machines is the fundamental problem here

I kind of get what you're saying, but let us not pretend that SW engineers are perfect rule followers either.

Having a framework to work within, whether you are an LLM or a human, can be helpful.

Re: Agent Skills

#93
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…

Humans also drop any hard requirements you specify regularly, and similarly require review. Nevertheless we manage to increase reliability of human output through processes and reviews, and most of the methods we use for harnesses are taken from experience with how to reduce reliability issues in humans, who are notoriously difficult to ensure delivers reliably.

Re: Agent Skills

#94

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

I work on projects where we measure the output. There's nothing "pseudo" about it.

Re: Agent Skills

#95
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not the same person, but it really depends on projects. E.g. I have some projects that involve working to large specification sets where we can measure rate of delivery against the spec. If your spec is fuzzy and incomplete, then it gets hard, but then you have little insight into human productivity for those projects either.

Re: Agent Skills

#96
post #94

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

I work on projects where we measure the output. There's nothing "pseudo" about it.

Tell me, what do you measure? Changes shipped? Lines of code? Customer satisfaction? Defect rate? MTTR? New engineer onboarding time/TTFC? Security/compliance audit turnaround time? Uptime? Employee retention? Rollback/forward-fix rates? Linter errors? Test coverage? Meaningful test coverage?

Re: Agent Skills

#97
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.

It's likely the people that were not good developers that suddenly got accelerated "to the top" that seem the most for it. All of the good devs I know have been a bit more cautious on the uptake.

Re: Agent Skills

#98
Agents Skills are built upon “Five design decisions [that] are the load-bearing ones”

And Open Design (HN front page yesterday) is supported by “Six load-bearing ideas”

The similarities in the way these prompt libraries are documented doesn’t feel coincidental.

Re: Agent Skills

#99

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

i treat it like Minecraft automation - it's just for funsies and to pass the time haha I don't think agentic workflows are there yet, but implementing skills to manually call and use while working side by side with an AI is definitely nice - our company is focused a lot on sandboxing right now and having safe skills I don't think we've gotten feature development well yet, but the review skills + grafana skills they w…

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Re: Agent Skills

#100
post #80
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm wondering if there are anti-ai bots trolling the boards. Look at all the usernames of the negative AI posts. Or maybe the only people left opposing AI are so hardcore against it they form their identity (username) around it

ok bot403
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