picklenerd

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.

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

This is almost every upper division undergrad math class. It was always fun watching people squirm when they pulled out some useful fact from their past 14 years of math education and then got told they had to prove it before they could use it.