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Comment by amadeuswoo | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: has anyone found skills that fundamentally changed their workflow vs. ones that are just ‘nice to have’? Curious what the actual power-user stack looks like.

Anyways, great work on this btw, the agent-agnostic approach is the right call

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Basically skills are /commands that can have attached scripts, that's about it.

If your "skill" doesn't come with scripts/executables, it's just a fancy slash command.

I've had success with code quality analysis skills that use PEP723 Python scripts with tree-sitter to actually analyse the code structure as an AST. The script output and switches are specifically optimised for LLM use, no extra fluff - just condensed content with the exact data needed.

I would double - do skills reliably work for you? I mean are they reliably injected when there is a need, as opposed to being actively called for (which in my opinion defeats the purpose of skills - because I can always ask the llm to read a document and then do something with the new knowledge).

I have a feeling that codex still does not do it reliably - so I still have normal README files which it loads quite intelligently and it works better than the discovery via skills.

> power-user stack

Try installing the Claude Superpowers skills - you can install them one by one from here, but it's easier to install the superpowers plugin. Try using it for a couple of sessions and see how it works for you.

For a full test, try starting with the brainstorming one which then guides you from brainstorming though planning, development etc.

I've been using it for a few days and I would say it's enhanced my workflows at least.

One simple but useful flow is to ask cc to review a session and find miss-matches between initial skills / agent.md and current session, and propose an edit. I then skim over it and add it. It feels like it helps, but I don't have quantitative data yet.

My experience with them is limited, but I’m having issues with the LLMs ignoring the skills content. I guess it makes sense, it’s like any other piece of context.

But it’s put a damper in my dream of constraining them with well crafted skills, and producing high quality output.

Yeah, I'm still trying to figure out why some skills are used every day, while others are constantly ignored. I suspect partially overlapping skill areas might confuse it.

I've added a UserPromptSubmit hook that does basic regex matches on requests, and tries to interject a tool suggestion, but it's still not foolproof.

Yeah, the context window is a blunt instrument, everything competes for attention. I get better luck with shorter, more opinionated skills that front-load the key constraints vs. comprehensive docs that get diluted. Also explicitly invoking them (use the X skill) seems to help vs hoping they get picked up automatically

Yes, unfortunately the most reliable way is to inject them into the user prompt at a fresh session. My guess is that biasing towards checking for the tools availability too much affects performance, which might explain why it is quite rarer that I see it just choose to use a skill without previous prompting.

Define "fundamental", but I added skills to run complicated evaluation procedures for my ML research. This way I can open 5 CC instances, let them run and iterate on research without intervention. After that, I can do the final review.

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