6 ms·

I don't use any skills, what kinds of skills are people finding most useful? For general tasks, the model seems perfectly capable of figuring out things itself

I don't use any skills, what kinds of skills are people finding most useful? For general tasks, the model seems perfectly capable of figuring out things itself, for project or environment specific tasks, I just put that information in the readme or agents.md file.

nvch 10d ago
For starters, if you repeat a specific prompt multiple times per day, you may save it as a skill.
- LTL_FTC 10d ago
  Claude will do this for you after a few times. But yes, I have a skill called plan-to-epic which creates a Jira epic and ticket per milestone. It helps my agents persist context and, because I’m terrible at competing with my coworkers for “visibility,” means I can point to all my work if asked.
skybrian 10d ago
I have a couple of skills with project-specific conventions for how to write a plan and how to write HTML-generating code. But they could probably just as well be .md files in a docs directory, linked to from the AGENTS.md file.
killingtime74 10d ago
It's not that, is for: Ensuring certain vetted implementation method is used. E.g. you always want tests or docs, or always done. Caching certain scripts so it's not reinvented each time with risk of error/need reviewing.
dxjxjdjsssb 10d ago
I use skills for offloading work onto subagents. By configuring the skill to use a specific model it gets enforced at the harness instead of depending on the good will of the orchestrating model to actually delegate. This also saves context. Today Fable had to fetch a zip file from a web page with a eula prompt, then get at a file in a disk image in the zip. This is something that will need to happen a lot as part of this project. I asked Fable for a skill/script combo suitable for Haiku to accomplish the task, and now that task happens at minimal cost during an analysis run.
- jeffreygoesto 10d ago
  Did you consider writing a small Python script for that?
  - nottorp 9d ago
    ... or telling the LLM to write a small python script for that and install it as a mcp or something ...
squirrellous 10d ago
One way I use skills, which I don’t see mentioned very often, is as “shortcuts”. Imagine some frequently issued prompt like “fetch origin and rebase this branch onto origin/master and resolve conflicts”. I make that into a little skills file called “rebase” with a one sentence description, and next time just type something like “/reb-tab-enter”.
gavmor 10d ago
Well, for non-general tasks, of course. For example particular tooling that's required for the environment. I will often make a skill out of the docs for any of the frameworks or libraries that we're using but with which I'm unfamiliar. When I'm creating that skill, I focus on idiomatic implementation and usage. It's not enough for the code to work—I want it to work "with the grain" and "through the front door", as it were. By default, these models are just all too willing to reinvent the wheel and monkeypatch as they go.
pletnes 10d ago
I make skills for «this is how I like to do things in this company / project». Query test database, git branch names, commit message style, which cloud things can be inspected like logs etc. I don’t see the point in trying to teach the models things that is in the documentation of git, python, what have you. They already know.
- stanmancan 10d ago
  Isn’t that what the agents.md in your project is for?
  - paool 10d ago
    I try to keep agents/Claude.md as tiny as possible. With high level "truths" that don't change. Stack used, invariants, file structure, and some scripts. Skills are more for things you do often. I run mutation tests, type check,linting,etc. I _could_ just prompt and copy/paste the same prompt each time I need to, or I can just run /tests. I also have skills for specialized tasks I need every once in a while, like a ux skill, a text skill optimized for xyz, etc.
  - jpalomaki 10d ago
    Depends on how much information and details you have. The agents.md always goes into context. Detailed testing or process information might be excessive, when agent is working on UI. Skills are pulled when needed.
    - distances 10d ago
      I handle the context problem by splitting the details to dozens of small md files. Agents.md acts as a router that directs the llm to correct documentation file/folder according to the task at hand. This documentation is its own git repo, and the agents.md file has an explicit instruction to update the docs when it has learned something general that can be useful in future sessions. I then occasionally review and prune those docs.
      - 10d ago
kkarpkkarp 10d ago
> I don't use any skills, what kinds of skills are people finding most useful? I create/edit/delete at least one skill per day. I can't imagine working effectively without those files. The most common case: if I see something took AI too much time and tokens and it is done, I ask my Cursor immedietly after to save it as skill. So next time I do the same I just refer to skill. I don't need to remember the name of the skill, I just mention something like "do {explaining briefly the task}, you have done something similar in the past and it is saved as skill"
Zambyte 10d ago
Your agents.md is a good place for high level facts, but if you have something that requires a lot of info to explain (ie: if there is a complex build process, testing patterns, things like that), loading up your agents.md for every request may be a bad idea. Offloading that information to a skill ensures it's only included in the context if you're actually using it.
- sampullman 10d ago
  How about linking to a separate docs file from the Readme, same as how you'd split separate topics into different files for humans? The context cost is low and as far as I can tell it's pretty much how Claude's "memory" feature works.
  - matsemann 10d ago
    That splitting is basically what a skill is, with some instructions as to when to load it. Depending on the harness used it might be quite equivalent, but not sure how easy it follows links in the readme compared to skills (which is just a glorified name of a readme anyways)
    - sampullman 10d ago
      Right, it's all just text file management. My point is that if I can add a few lines of description with links in my readme/agents/etc instead of manually including skills in the prompt, without any downside, I'd rather do that.
- swingboy 9d ago
  The content of AGENTS.md is typically included in the system prompt and benefits from prompt caching.
- Zambyte 9d ago
  Something else I want to add on to be more specific is that I use skills to document tasks that my model doesn't know how to do out of the box. For example, there is a jira cli[0] that I use for interfacing with jira. If I just say something like "add an issue for X on jira", the model will have no idea how to interface with jira. I could add that the jira cli is installed on my system, but it's not popular enough for the model I use to just know how to use the CLI, and it will end up spending a lot of tokens guessing how to use it, failing, reading the help output, trying again, etc. Adding a skill for jira lets me capture how to use the cli, and makes prompts like the original usually work first try. If something still requires the model to iterate with the cli, I will ask the model why it failed originally, and ask it to update the skill file accordingly, to avoid the same failures in the future. [0] https://github.com/ankitpokhrel/jira-cli https://github.com/ankitpokhrel/jira-cli
ygjb 10d ago
So the term used internally is to make things "Determinishtic". I use skills extensively, combined with SOPs, scripts and MCP servers. An example skill I have is SessionMiner, which is installed via post session hooks in Claude and Kiro, and analyzes the session, what was accomplished, and whether or not it should be turned into a skill, then when it summarizes it, the decisions it came to and either fires off a message to me for followup if it decides a new skill or tool should be built, or it catalogues the approach so that future analysis can identify trends in how I use the tools. Over time it has built me a fairly decent stable of repeatable skills and tools, and highlighted process deficiencies and nominated process changes that I have pursued. Another skill is a communications analysis skill; I started using it summer last year I think, and it scans my communications across a broad cross-section of my activity online. It tracks the commitments I make, ensures that I follow up with people that I might miss, ranks and scores my communication against my own personal targets that I set to make sure that I am communicating effectively. As a person who has had a decently successful career despite autism spectrum and unmedicated ADHD (I was medicated, but unfortunately each medication I tried had adverse side effects), it has made me much more effective in tracking work and following through, especially on the "boring" stuff that is actually critical to being a dependable team member, and effective partner for the teams I support. Just a couple of examples.
- hypfer 10d ago
  You're putting a lot of trust into the judgement abilities of what is just a next token predictor there. I can see what the goals are there, and they do make sense I suppose, but I'm not confident that what you're handing off there can be handed off to that degree. But maybe that is not the point and the point instead is to see what the LLM thinks would be correct, and then think about that and collect learnings about the world from it. It might not be right, but it still tells you how normal people think. So that's useful. Just a very roundabout way to achieve that, but that's fine, I guess.
- ericmcer 9d ago
  "Another skill is a communications analysis skill" It is interesting how people delineate what is a "skill". A 50 word prompt can be called a skill. This process you are describing sounds like it is highly authed and polling or hooked into multiple apps (slack?, text messages?, email?, forums, etc.) and then piping output to an LLM and to generate reports that it pushes to you based on output. You might need some data store to hold all the different communications locally as well. That is almost a full on app/service that uses an LLM for one layer, but it is still just called a "skill".
petesergeant 10d ago
Gateway drug is “/grilling” by Matt Pocock.
rctlabs 10d ago
[flagged]
deleted 9d ago
[deleted]
sjanes 9d ago
I made an agent skill for `tsort` and that unlocked a lot of interesting things. Giving the agent an external tool to consider the sequencing of anything with dependencies led to some creative construction and offloading sequencing not unlike offloading calculation. (I also made a `bc` skill). https://github.com/sj4nes/clanker-tools https://github.com/sj4nes/clanker-tools is where I've been riffing on this. My plan is to collect not "just skills" so much but "capsules" of reliable knowledge that agents can pull without confabulation. I'm already hitting the organizational stumbles, so this HN thread is right-on-time.

nvch 10d ago

For starters, if you repeat a specific prompt multiple times per day, you may save it as a skill.

LTL_FTC 10d ago
Claude will do this for you after a few times. But yes, I have a skill called plan-to-epic which creates a Jira epic and ticket per milestone. It helps my agents persist context and, because I’m terrible at competing with my coworkers for “visibility,” means I can point to all my work if asked.

skybrian 10d ago

I have a couple of skills with project-specific conventions for how to write a plan and how to write HTML-generating code. But they could probably just as well be .md files in a docs directory, linked to from the AGENTS.md file.

killingtime74 10d ago

It's not that, is for: Ensuring certain vetted implementation method is used. E.g. you always want tests or docs, or always done. Caching certain scripts so it's not reinvented each time with risk of error/need reviewing.

dxjxjdjsssb 10d ago

I use skills for offloading work onto subagents. By configuring the skill to use a specific model it gets enforced at the harness instead of depending on the good will of the orchestrating model to actually delegate. This also saves context. Today Fable had to fetch a zip file from a web page with a eula prompt, then get at a file in a disk image in the zip. This is something that will need to happen a lot as part of this project. I asked Fable for a skill/script combo suitable for Haiku to accomplish the task, and now that task happens at minimal cost during an analysis run.

jeffreygoesto 10d ago
Did you consider writing a small Python script for that?
- nottorp 9d ago
  ... or telling the LLM to write a small python script for that and install it as a mcp or something ...

squirrellous 10d ago

One way I use skills, which I don’t see mentioned very often, is as “shortcuts”. Imagine some frequently issued prompt like “fetch origin and rebase this branch onto origin/master and resolve conflicts”. I make that into a little skills file called “rebase” with a one sentence description, and next time just type something like “/reb-tab-enter”.

gavmor 10d ago

Well, for non-general tasks, of course. For example particular tooling that's required for the environment. I will often make a skill out of the docs for any of the frameworks or libraries that we're using but with which I'm unfamiliar. When I'm creating that skill, I focus on idiomatic implementation and usage. It's not enough for the code to work—I want it to work "with the grain" and "through the front door", as it were. By default, these models are just all too willing to reinvent the wheel and monkeypatch as they go.

pletnes 10d ago

I make skills for «this is how I like to do things in this company / project». Query test database, git branch names, commit message style, which cloud things can be inspected like logs etc. I don’t see the point in trying to teach the models things that is in the documentation of git, python, what have you. They already know.

stanmancan 10d ago
Isn’t that what the agents.md in your project is for?
- paool 10d ago
  I try to keep agents/Claude.md as tiny as possible. With high level "truths" that don't change. Stack used, invariants, file structure, and some scripts. Skills are more for things you do often. I run mutation tests, type check,linting,etc. I _could_ just prompt and copy/paste the same prompt each time I need to, or I can just run /tests. I also have skills for specialized tasks I need every once in a while, like a ux skill, a text skill optimized for xyz, etc.
- jpalomaki 10d ago
  Depends on how much information and details you have. The agents.md always goes into context. Detailed testing or process information might be excessive, when agent is working on UI. Skills are pulled when needed.
  - distances 10d ago
    I handle the context problem by splitting the details to dozens of small md files. Agents.md acts as a router that directs the llm to correct documentation file/folder according to the task at hand. This documentation is its own git repo, and the agents.md file has an explicit instruction to update the docs when it has learned something general that can be useful in future sessions. I then occasionally review and prune those docs.
    - 10d ago

kkarpkkarp 10d ago

> I don't use any skills, what kinds of skills are people finding most useful? I create/edit/delete at least one skill per day. I can't imagine working effectively without those files. The most common case: if I see something took AI too much time and tokens and it is done, I ask my Cursor immedietly after to save it as skill. So next time I do the same I just refer to skill. I don't need to remember the name of the skill, I just mention something like "do {explaining briefly the task}, you have done something similar in the past and it is saved as skill"

Zambyte 10d ago

Your agents.md is a good place for high level facts, but if you have something that requires a lot of info to explain (ie: if there is a complex build process, testing patterns, things like that), loading up your agents.md for every request may be a bad idea. Offloading that information to a skill ensures it's only included in the context if you're actually using it.

sampullman 10d ago
How about linking to a separate docs file from the Readme, same as how you'd split separate topics into different files for humans? The context cost is low and as far as I can tell it's pretty much how Claude's "memory" feature works.
- matsemann 10d ago
  That splitting is basically what a skill is, with some instructions as to when to load it. Depending on the harness used it might be quite equivalent, but not sure how easy it follows links in the readme compared to skills (which is just a glorified name of a readme anyways)
  - sampullman 10d ago
    Right, it's all just text file management. My point is that if I can add a few lines of description with links in my readme/agents/etc instead of manually including skills in the prompt, without any downside, I'd rather do that.
swingboy 9d ago
The content of AGENTS.md is typically included in the system prompt and benefits from prompt caching.
Zambyte 9d ago
Something else I want to add on to be more specific is that I use skills to document tasks that my model doesn't know how to do out of the box. For example, there is a jira cli[0] that I use for interfacing with jira. If I just say something like "add an issue for X on jira", the model will have no idea how to interface with jira. I could add that the jira cli is installed on my system, but it's not popular enough for the model I use to just know how to use the CLI, and it will end up spending a lot of tokens guessing how to use it, failing, reading the help output, trying again, etc. Adding a skill for jira lets me capture how to use the cli, and makes prompts like the original usually work first try. If something still requires the model to iterate with the cli, I will ask the model why it failed originally, and ask it to update the skill file accordingly, to avoid the same failures in the future. [0] https://github.com/ankitpokhrel/jira-cli https://github.com/ankitpokhrel/jira-cli

ygjb 10d ago

So the term used internally is to make things "Determinishtic". I use skills extensively, combined with SOPs, scripts and MCP servers. An example skill I have is SessionMiner, which is installed via post session hooks in Claude and Kiro, and analyzes the session, what was accomplished, and whether or not it should be turned into a skill, then when it summarizes it, the decisions it came to and either fires off a message to me for followup if it decides a new skill or tool should be built, or it catalogues the approach so that future analysis can identify trends in how I use the tools. Over time it has built me a fairly decent stable of repeatable skills and tools, and highlighted process deficiencies and nominated process changes that I have pursued. Another skill is a communications analysis skill; I started using it summer last year I think, and it scans my communications across a broad cross-section of my activity online. It tracks the commitments I make, ensures that I follow up with people that I might miss, ranks and scores my communication against my own personal targets that I set to make sure that I am communicating effectively. As a person who has had a decently successful career despite autism spectrum and unmedicated ADHD (I was medicated, but unfortunately each medication I tried had adverse side effects), it has made me much more effective in tracking work and following through, especially on the "boring" stuff that is actually critical to being a dependable team member, and effective partner for the teams I support. Just a couple of examples.

hypfer 10d ago
You're putting a lot of trust into the judgement abilities of what is just a next token predictor there. I can see what the goals are there, and they do make sense I suppose, but I'm not confident that what you're handing off there can be handed off to that degree. But maybe that is not the point and the point instead is to see what the LLM thinks would be correct, and then think about that and collect learnings about the world from it. It might not be right, but it still tells you how normal people think. So that's useful. Just a very roundabout way to achieve that, but that's fine, I guess.
ericmcer 9d ago
"Another skill is a communications analysis skill" It is interesting how people delineate what is a "skill". A 50 word prompt can be called a skill. This process you are describing sounds like it is highly authed and polling or hooked into multiple apps (slack?, text messages?, email?, forums, etc.) and then piping output to an LLM and to generate reports that it pushes to you based on output. You might need some data store to hold all the different communications locally as well. That is almost a full on app/service that uses an LLM for one layer, but it is still just called a "skill".

petesergeant 10d ago

Gateway drug is “/grilling” by Matt Pocock.

rctlabs 10d ago

[flagged]

deleted 9d ago

[deleted]

sjanes 9d ago

I made an agent skill for `tsort` and that unlocked a lot of interesting things. Giving the agent an external tool to consider the sequencing of anything with dependencies led to some creative construction and offloading sequencing not unlike offloading calculation. (I also made a `bc` skill). https://github.com/sj4nes/clanker-tools https://github.com/sj4nes/clanker-tools is where I've been riffing on this. My plan is to collect not "just skills" so much but "capsules" of reliable knowledge that agents can pull without confabulation. I'm already hitting the organizational stumbles, so this HN thread is right-on-time.