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> Skills don’t pollute the context window Of course they do. Do you really think that there's a magical bag of holding for the potentially infinite amount of s
by troupo 3mo ago
> Skills don’t pollute the context window
Of course they do. Do you really think that there's a magical bag of holding for the potentially infinite amount of skills?
- ricardobeat 3mo agoSkills don’t need to be preloaded, can be invoked by name on demand; and when you list available skills, a one-line description for each is enough.
- troupo 3mo agoAnd all those "names and one-line descriptions" live in an .md file and of course pollute your context. And then the model will randomly decide to load the .md file that is the "skill" randomly at any point. Again polluting the context. There's no magic.
- CrompyBlompers 3mo agoMost people seem to mean "Skills don't pollute the context window [with their entire contents]", they just elide the part in brackets. There is no magic and people should be more precise when discussing skills.
- NiloCK 3mo agoYes, but I expect that the elided part is less important than people assume it is. Token count is a less important factor in context pollution than idea count. The worst of the rot factors are when models latch onto irrelevant information, or over-index on some vague idea/suggestion as if it was a hard direction, and then go off course. The names + one-line descriptions of 10 tools can do as much (or more!) to distract the focus and intentionality of an agent than a 30k token exhaustive API documentation of some tool.
- simonw 3mo agoI've seen implementations of a skill search, where instead of loading all descriptions into the initial prompt there's a tool the agent can call to search available skills and see if one might match their new task.
- troupo 3mo agoSearch itself pollutes the context. With the need to maintain the tools, the search, the search results etc. in context. And wasting tokens while interpreting results.
- majormajor 3mo agoIs it so unusual to just ... not ... load the file with a description of them all automatically, but have different files listing different ones for different situations, and manually point to them in prompts?
- troupo 3mo agoDepends on how the harness injects those files. All harnesses these days auto-discover "skills" and read them anyway, and inject their descriptions, at the very least. Which leads to this anyway: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49183906 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49183906 But yeah. You could have files with skills outside of the auto-discovered skill tree, and invoke them manually.