I read this post thinking "Finally! Finally someone will explain to me what I've been missing because 'skills' just seem to be re-usable text that help make prompting faster."

Nope. Still the same.

Agree on article frustrations. Perhaps a better explanation, skills are just disk-cached prompts conditioned on verified success. The conditioned on verified success part might seem inconsequential, but it’s the whole thing that gives skills their value. Also the fact that their loading can be scoped to a certain calling context.

yeah, thats what they are, but thats useful! you have an agents.md, that gets put into every conversation. But studies and experience both show that as that gets longer, the agent becomes less capable. so instead of telling it everything useful under the sun, you put only really important things there, and the rest of the advice for common but not every time actions you put into skills. I personally have like, 5 skills. one that works with the database, and has a bunch of context about the schema, how to connect and work with documents, example queries written just how I like them (and pre-written with filters to reduce the risk of ai ingesting a million rows worth on tokens for no reason), a python script I wrote to do certain common operations and how to use it for different tasks.

So in essence, the ideal skill imo is pretty much a list of shell commands with a sentence next to each of when to use them

With these, I personally have skills for:

- dealing with our metrics and tracing platform

- dealing with jira

- dealing with confluence (mostly finding info I need via different search strategies without using too many tokens)

- dealing with database

- doing reviews (this one is more prompting about what info I need to review well myself, rather than commands, though it does instruct the agent to download the branch into a new worktree and clean it up after its done with specific commands)

Im generally suspicious of people with hundreds of skills, especially those I open and find ai generated writing inside. skills should be a list of commands, maybe with some pitfalls for the agent to avoid, added only by human experience (agents are terrible at prompting)

Agree; posts like this frustrate me.

Tldr: you're doing it wrong but I will not show you how to do it right. I also did not run the bench using my approach but it definitely “vibes better” to me, and I reject your actual research paper.

Come on, show us some actual skills.

That one you use all the time looks a hell of a lot like “I wont a deterministic shell script for something a skill saying ‘run the shell script’”

Is that what you do? How much time do you spend on them? How do you stop the agent from making a bunch of very similar skills? How do you deal with the explosion of the total number of skills impacting your token use? Do you use skills from github, or is that bad practice? Why?

So many unanswered questions; so little content. :/

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