Skills feel analogous to behavioral programs. If you give an agent access to a programmable substrate (e.g. bash + CLI tools), you write these Markdown programs which are triggered and read when the agent thinks certain behaviors will be beneficial.

It's a great idea: really neat take on programmability, and can be reloaded while the agent is running without tweaking the harness, etc -- lots of benefits.

`pi` has a great skills implementation too.

I think skills might really shine if you take a minimal approach to the system prompt (like `pi`) -- a lot of the times, if I want to orchestrate the agent in some complex behavior, I want to start fresh, and having it walk through a bunch of skills ... possibly the smaller the system prompt, the more likely the agent is to follow the skills without issue.

Yes -- skills live in a special gap between "should have been a deterministic program" and "model already had the ability to figure this out". My personal experience leaves me in agreement that minimal system prompts are definitely the way to go.