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Comment by serf | Hacker News Reader

>I believe skills will eventually be eating by model capabilities

a model capability is never going to fill in an unknowable blank that a custom skill (or whatever equivalent your paradigm supports) can.

a model might have the cleverness to whoami and look through the .ssh folder for keys and evidence of past connections when asked to connect to bob, but a skills file can just easily say "We connect to bob using key Z and user X." so that the operation gets done without all this nonsense needless inference as far into the future as the information is valid for.

a concise information dense skill is going to always dominate on tokens-burnt for any given task that requires insider knowledge. it simply gets rid of the entire investigative phase of work.

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Agree here. My philosophy is the "general-purpose" coding agent will keep getting better and better, making skills less and less useful. And it will probably get better at a pace far greater than the customization folks can build around them via skills.

This of course is from my own experience writing code, where agents are already good at software engineering conventions. This probably doesn't hold as well for other tasks, say writing marketing copy with a unique voice

For now, I keep skills pretty minimal - single sentence prompts I send all the time, like "Remove all the slam poetry from the docs in this repo."

I also tend to share often. All skills go into a repo my team can access. No pressure, use them, riff on them, add your own - sharing and engaging on how we do the work is more important than making everyone do the work the same way to me.

What I meant by skills getting eating by models are the "general use" skills, like design critique, code review...ect

But, for custom use skills, ofc no model will be able to replace them and it's not efficient to try to do that as well. For this type of skills I create and maintain them by myself, my question was about "general use" skills, they are everywhere on the internet, how do you manage them?

Do you find any of the general use skills useful? I'm not sure I've ever used any of them, and when I've looked at them it's been some YouTuber trying to make money. That, and their Substack.

I know everyone's down on MCP, but custom-built client side MCP tools are what I find useful instead. But that's me.

Honestly Im not able to verify, I just throw things at the model and iterate with it. The most useful skills are the ones that I create

“ determinist harness around the agent ”

Can you explain what this means?

If you can express something deterministically with code, it's better to do that rather than have an agent do it, because it's faster, cheaper, and deterministic. E.g. you regularly copy file A to file B. You can ask the agent to do it, or you can write a script and have the agent call the script via skill. That's the beginning of a harness.

Eventually you arrive at building custom software that does a lot in the traditional way, but delegates certain tasks to the model where it makes sense or it's non-trivial/impossible to express via code.

That makes sense. Sounds similar to what I am usually doing. I let AI write a python script or similar, review it and then use the python script. I don't think I would let AI do anything important directly.

How do you disseminate that information to humans?

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