Looking at the comments here it's clear that there's a lack of understanding about what skills fundamentally are, they're process or procedure.

The latest frontier models exhibit good process that was trained into them during the RL phase, and whilst that might make them massively more capable in terms of one-shot, or general coding ability, models without skills simply don't have a durable process.

If you have a need for procedure in your use of agents, you absolutely need skills like this. I'm not commenting on the relative merits of this or superpowers, but rather the seemingly religious debate, "skills are good" vs "skills are bad" discussion that keeps coming up.

Yeah, i agree.

Most of the comments here seem to focus on specific things people were trying to get out of skills, and whether those are still needed.

That is going to vary a lot.

If your goal with something like superpowers was to have a process that made your model work "properly" on tasks, sure that's probably not needed anymore.

If your goal with something like superpowers was to get a consistent set of artifacts alongside what was developed (quality varying, so i mean consistent here as "one design plan, one implementation plan", not "good"), nothing has changed, models do not do this without something telling them to do this.

People seem to have used various skills to achieve different things, and so have wildly different views on what is still necessary.

I think I don't understand what you mean by process. I just tell the LLM what process I want it to follow, e.g. follow the plan document, use cheaper subagents when appropriate, respond to PR comments before merging, etc. It's usually a short paragraph.

I do use skills for other things, I don't believe that skills are bad. I'm just not sure what they add in this case.