Agent Skills

(addyosmani.com)

72 points | by BOOSTERHIDROGEN 3 hours ago

11 comments

  • turlockmike 30 minutes ago
    The best way to prompt an LLM is to describe the outcome you want, that's it. They are trained as task completers. A clear outcome is way better than a process.

    If the LLM fails, either you didn't describe your outcome sufficiently or is misinterpreted what you said or it couldn't do it (rare).

    Common errors should be encoded as context for future similar tasks, don't bloat skills with stuff that isn't shown to be necessary.

    • alexjurkiewicz 0 minutes ago
      I agree that many skills are overblown and unnecessary. But there's a lot of value in giving AI the right process. See how much more effective Claude can be for moderate or large changes when using the superpowers skill.
  • CharlesW 1 hour ago
    From an SEO/LLMO perspective, the discoverability of these skills will be difficult without a rename: https://agentskills.io/

    If Addy reads this, how do you pitch this vs. Superpowers? https://github.com/obra/superpowers

    • ricardobeat 27 minutes ago
      Does superpowers actually work? The main skill file doesn't inspire much confidence:

          "If you think there is even a 1% chance a skill might apply to what you are doing, you ABSOLUTELY MUST invoke the skill."
    • consumer451 58 minutes ago
      I would love to know how many people are actually using superpowers.

      I showed up on the agentic dev scene prior to superpowers, and I am getting concerned that >50% of my self-rolled processes are now covered by superpowers.

      I no longer trust gh stars, can anyone chime in? Is superpowers now truly adopted?

      If it is truly valuable, why hasn't Boris integrated the concepts yet?

      • nullstyle 45 minutes ago
        I just removed superpowers from my own setup. In my opinion, given the quality of the planning modes in both claude code and codex, superpowers was really just slowing things down and burning more tokens than vanilla.
        • consumer451 27 minutes ago
          Thank you for the data point.

          To give back as much as I can, I use the two built-in CC review processes when appropriate. But, those only do "is this PR good code?"

          Far too late did I finally roll my own custom review skill that tests: "does this PR accomplish what the specs required?"

          If I could ask for one more vanilla CC skill, it might be that. However, maybe rolling your own repo-aware skill via prompt is better?

    • esafak 56 minutes ago
      Looks like a bunch of canned skills served through a plugin?
  • zmmmmm 12 minutes ago
    I was surprised how long some of these skills are. They are pages and pages long with tables and checkbox lists and code examples, etc.

    Curious how normal that is - it would only take a couple of these to really fill the context alot.

  • gavmor 32 minutes ago
    Naming things is such a hard problem that many devs don't even bother trying.

    That being said, this post is full of reasonable assertions, so I'm looking forward to experimenting with this... whatever it is.

  • ElijahLynn 1 hour ago
    I've been using Agent Skills on a new side project and I'm really impressed so far! It really holds my hand a lot of the way and really lets me focus on developing a product instead of figuring out how to build it. I get to focus much more energy on high level architecture and product design.

    Very grateful for this repository and everyone who contributed to it!

  • senko 56 minutes ago
    > This isn’t a coincidence. It’s the same SDLC every functioning engineering organisation runs, just in different vocabulary. [...] Amazon calls it the working-backwards memo and the bar raiser. Every healthy team has some version of this loop.

    This (sdlc == working backwards & bar raiser) is so horribly wrong, that I hope this was an LLM hallucination.

    In general, I'm starting to see these agent scaffolding systems as an anti-pattern: people obsess over systems for guiding agents and construct elaborate rube-goldberg machines and then others cargo-cult them wholesale, in an effort to optimize and control a random process and minimize human involvement.

    • yks 13 minutes ago
      The problem is it’s so rarely A/B tested, definitely not at scale. An engineer, who writes all these my-workflow-but-for-agents skills, proceeds to get the good outcome, while also seeing affirmations that the agent did follow the prescribed processes - that is considered a victory. In reality the outcome could’ve been just as good if they fed Claude a spec + acceptance criteria, or even a basic prompt for the simpler tasks.
    • BOOSTERHIDROGEN 9 minutes ago
      This is how similarly we collectively approach Taylorism, isn't it? However, the world favors capitalism, of which Taylorism becomes a handy scaffolding.
  • y-curious 1 hour ago
    Thanks for this, going to steal a lot of this. I would install your plugin, but I worry about being able to delete it later. I also think that each one of these is better served customized to a developer. That said, I'm still going to grab some of these, thanks!
  • gosukiwi 1 hour ago
    I wonder how does this compare to superpowers
  • encoderer 2 hours ago
    I adopted a couple of these, the api design and ui testing ones have been particularly helpful.
  • stevenpetryk 54 minutes ago
    [dead]
  • saluc28 2 hours ago
    [dead]