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Comment by alexhans | Hacker News Reader

Skills are just a good standard to describe repeatable workflows saving context through progressive disclosure, prompt sharing and, very underused feature, also bound the non deterministic parts with determism (which could be scripts).

Conceptually, you should treat them as incremental software instead of magic you grab from others [1]

The killer feature is that coding harnesses tend to have SkillBuilder agent skills so creating them becomes very easy and you can evolve them.

I recommend you build your own for your particular pain points.

Very simple example [2] showing what another user mentioned around "evals" so that you can really achieve good enough correctness for your automation.

- [1] https://alexhans.github.io/posts/series/evals/building-agent...

- [2] https://alexhans.github.io/posts/series/evals/sketch-to-text...

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After reading your first article I'm not sure I would agree. Skills are certainly transferrable in the sense that a sufficiently narrowly-tailored skill can be applicable for others with no modification. Similar to how we grab libraries that encapsulate certain abstractions for us.

Sorry. I'm not sure about the specific part you don't agree with. You prefer people to just use skills instead of building them?

That's fair but I think this is similar to power tools like vim, obsidian or others. There's the path of grabbing other people's workflows and not being able to modify them to really tailor the tool to your needs and there's the minimal incremental path that empowers you and gives you control all the way through. It gets you to understand the tools and you'll be able to think possibilities that match your exact problems.

I'm not dogmatic about it but I do really recommend it. You can see the transformative shift once people start "skill building" instead of "skill consuming".

Edit: The approach I mention works with non engineers/developers. So there's no different technical bar.

They’re transferable to the next agent context session because every new session is a blank slate from the agents point of view. Capturing a workflow in skills is highly useful for your own workflows that you refine over time because you don’t have to reintroduce the concepts. You can use a lot of these triggers like hooks and scripts required by the skill use to inject a fair amount of constraints and determinism, and lean on the abductive abilities of the LLM to fill in the reasoning gaps. Teams also compile libraries of skills in plugin form via marketplaces to allow a certain amount of conformity of process, procedure, etc.

This is an interesting skill plugin for me because I actually face this inverse problem a fair amount where you want to teach people about a repo and the skills associated with it so they understand the intent behind things quickly. Seeing a bunch of skill commands and behaviors doesn’t always make clear why things are the way they are. The people on the other end need context, and the rapidity with which you can create fairly complex stuff means you need a faster way than “three months of onboarding” to get people up to speed.

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