Comment by picklenerd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by picklenerd | Hacker News Reader

I don’t find skills. I write my own skills based on things I do frequently and repeatably. I keep them version controlled locally and in GitHub, and I symlink that folder to my various agent skill folders so they all stay up to date.

I feel like downloading a bunch of skills is another one of those useless collections people make purely because they have infinite options. It’s like those collections of thousands of bookmarks you’re never going to click or pirated ebooks you’re never going to read.

It’s trivial to write your own skills with agents. The best way to use them, imo, is to make them when you have repeatable agent workflows, written to your own personal taste, and updated as your workflows change.

Here’s what I have for reference:

- Remove agent-speak from code, docs, and markdown files.

- Ask sequences of questions the way I like to be asked questions. Used instead of the question tool. This is my primary design skill as well.

- How to use jj the way I want my agent to use jj

- Dispatch subagents with 6 different sets of priorities. Those priorities are defined in the skill, so I can always dispatch all 6 of them to write or review code. Includes a template for code reviews

- Manage a local MD issue tracker for personal projects

+1

Skills are used to steer individual models towards desirable behaviors they don't exhibit by default. They're not Pokemon cards. They clutter your context, sometimes for essentially 0 benefit.

Similar take here - I only find value in skills as a way to repeatably carry out tasks that are specific to my workflow; any skills I've seen shared broadly don't seem to add much value beyond what the model itself can already handle.

At work I'll occasionally repurpose a skill that someone else has shared as a starting point, but those skills are already somewhat customized to the environment I operate in.

I have all of my skills maintain a single table in a markdown file with a description of each skill, when it last ran, exceptions it encountered, and when it was last edited.

Tracking skill usage like this is really smart, stealing this!

+1 to keeping ownership of skills defining just what I like and symlinking them in where I work.

What are the benefits of skills at all. Does it increase the capability of the LLM?

If you have a certain set of actions that repeat a lot or if you have scripts that need ran.

A skill can help so the model doesn’t need to relearn how to use said scripts.

Skills are like human-readable computer programs. I have one to do releases at work; how to get the canary approved (2 slack messages required), how to ensure that the rollout is happening, what to look for while the rollout is proceeding (any incidents opened during the rollout? error rate look good vs. the non-drained pods?) and then how to repeat that process for the next two tiers. It keeps a ticket updated with the current status so others can follow along and not wonder "is there a release going on?" "did we do a release yesterday?"

You could also write a computer program to do this, but because so much random special stuff can come up during a multi-hour release, it's sort of great to not have anything hard-coded and to let a frontier model be there to assist you when things are weird. (Weird things that have come up -- hung kustomization controllers, release freezes, etc. When Claude notices during the release, you can just get a ticket to go fix it. When you're doing it manually, it would probably be a half hour of investigating "why didn't our release go here?". Such a time saver and a safety net on risky rollouts.)

So that's the sort of thing I use Claude for. Things that are computer-program like, but ad-hoc enough to not really want to write a computer program for it.

No it customizes the capabilities of the LLM to your own workflows.

I don’t like the Q&A tools built into my agent harnesses. I have a skill that describes how to ask me questions, including a template and a few rules for more rare situations.

Instead of typing an 80 line prompt every session about how to ask me questions, I just tell my agent to use this skill.

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