Hacker News Reader

Comment by beoberha | Hacker News Reader

It’s a fast moving field. People aren’t coming up with new ideas to be performative. They see issues with the state of the art and make something that may or may not advance things forward. MCP is huge for getting agents to do things in the “real world”. However, it’s costly! Skills is a cheap way to fill that gap for many cases. People are finding immediate value in both of these. Try not to be so pessimistic.

View on HN

It's not pessimism, but actual compatibility issues

like deno vs npm package ecosystems that didn't work together for many years

There are multiple AGENTS vs CLAUDE vs .github/instructions; skills vs commands; ... intermixed and inconsistent concepts, all out in the wild

When I work on a project, do all the files align? If I work in an org, where developers have agent choice, how many of these instructions and skills "distros" do I need to put (pollute?) my repo with?

Skills have been really helpful in my team as we've been encoding tribal knowledge into something that other developers can easily take advantage of. For example, our backend architecture has these hidden patterns, that once encoding in a skill, can be followed by full stack devs doing work there, saving a ton of time in coding and PR review.

We then hit the problem of how to best share these and keep them up to date, especially with multiple repositories. It led us to build sx - https://github.com/sleuth-io/sx, a package manager for AI tools.

Depending on your workflow, none.

While I do agentic development in personal projects a lot at this point, at work it's super rare beyond quick lookups to things I should already know but can't be arsed to remember exactly (like writing a one-off SQL scripts which does batching mutations and similar)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com