10 ms·

Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?

• bredren 25d ago
  I use skills all day, every day. One of my greatest annoyances right now is having to switch between `/` and `$` in moving between CC and codex. At one point I attempted to hack the CC TUI to accept $ but failed, I may yet return to that. All of my skills are custom to my workflows except Contextify (more on that at the end) This extends to how I distribute them across multiple development machines. They live in my `cli-ai-setup` repo alongside agent settings, git worktree tooling, iTerm workspace restoration (important, machines have to restart and crash sometimes), code review scripts, and machine setup guides. I use git to carry changes between machines and a setup script to symlink the skills into a shared directory that Claude Code and Codex both use. I have a `skills-and-settings` skill specifically for deciding where new skills belong and how to make them available (project, global, application). I also have a custom `skill-create` skill that turns sessios into new skills or updates existing ones. Importantly, I also have entire custom applications I have not yet made open source that my cli-ai-stack relies on. I do expect to distribute these so they live in their own repo and are symlinked or installed in as appropriate. For maintenance, I've largely handled this manually and organically. When a skill is not performing, I'll use the context of the situation as the ~1 shot or pull in more examples for the ai: This skill seems to not be performing as expected on [something]. This has happened a couple of times now use /total-recall to find similar recent situations for example [something I remember]" Recommend updates to the skill and upon approval commit and push them...etc. My other machines watch this repo and the symlink structure means that the updates are carried into live cli-ai sessions almost immediately. This past week I was exploring the automatic skill improvement behavior described in the Anthropic blog guest post with their partner org. I'd previously build a "dreaming" skill that works okay and think there may be some value yet to plumb there. For skill creation, I have a skill that reads the official skill docs for both Claude Code and Codex. This way the skills are built to handle both platforms particularities. I automatically pull those docs into local Markdown daily, so it has a regularly refreshed reference for what each tool supports. As mentioned above, I have built Contextify (https://contextify.sh https://contextify.sh) which provides a sql database of all of my Claude Code an Codex session transcripts across all of my development machines. The skill for this (/total-recall) is the most important skill I have and I use it constantly.
• serf 26d ago
  >I believe skills will eventually be eating by model capabilities a model capability is never going to fill in an unknowable blank that a custom skill (or whatever equivalent your paradigm supports) can. a model might have the cleverness to whoami and look through the .ssh folder for keys and evidence of past connections when asked to connect to bob, but a skills file can just easily say "We connect to bob using key Z and user X." so that the operation gets done without all this nonsense needless inference as far into the future as the information is valid for. a concise information dense skill is going to always dominate on tokens-burnt for any given task that requires insider knowledge. it simply gets rid of the entire investigative phase of work.
  • TomEleff 26d ago
    Agree here. My philosophy is the "general-purpose" coding agent will keep getting better and better, making skills less and less useful. And it will probably get better at a pace far greater than the customization folks can build around them via skills. This of course is from my own experience writing code, where agents are already good at software engineering conventions. This probably doesn't hold as well for other tasks, say writing marketing copy with a unique voice For now, I keep skills pretty minimal - single sentence prompts I send all the time, like "Remove all the slam poetry from the docs in this repo." I also tend to share often. All skills go into a repo my team can access. No pressure, use them, riff on them, add your own - sharing and engaging on how we do the work is more important than making everyone do the work the same way to me.
  • imadtaieber 26d ago
    What I meant by skills getting eating by models are the "general use" skills, like design critique, code review...ect But, for custom use skills, ofc no model will be able to replace them and it's not efficient to try to do that as well. For this type of skills I create and maintain them by myself, my question was about "general use" skills, they are everywhere on the internet, how do you manage them?
    • SyneRyder 26d ago
      Do you find any of the general use skills useful? I'm not sure I've ever used any of them, and when I've looked at them it's been some YouTuber trying to make money. That, and their Substack. I know everyone's down on MCP, but custom-built client side MCP tools are what I find useful instead. But that's me.
• moomoo11 26d ago
  i have a docs/ it has all the skills/docs my particular application needs i treat it as ADRs as it helps the AI understand the parts of the system it is working on
• atxpace 26d ago
  [flagged]
• osr00 26d ago
  > How do you find skills I try to keep my collection of community skills short, usually a few established names (mattpocock, mcollina, trailsofbit). And then I check new releases (or when mattpocock published a youtube video for instance :D) > keep them organized For skills I wrote myself, I have my own private github repo. I use skills like /commands most of the time, so I can tell if they work straight away. For community skills, a package manager really helps. vercel-labs/skills and withastro/rosie are good options. I also built one myself: https://github.com/osrim/ski https://github.com/osrim/ski. It has some cool features like an update command and a security scan.
• jameshiew 26d ago
  I manage them as part of my dotfiles using chezmoi. A `.agents/skills/` directory + a symlink to there from `.claude/skills/`. > Do you keep improving them over time? In my global AGENTS.md I have a note to agents to explain any frustrations they had doing a task, and to suggest any skill/tool/AGENTS.md improvements. I am trying to keep AGENTS.md files small but still finding the balance.
  • rctlabs 26d ago
    [flagged]
• joshuanapoli 26d ago
  We have some company-managed skills, that help coding agents find the relationships between our repos, and our conventions, architecture, and other high-level decisions. These are supposed to be portable between agents, and so distributing them is currently awkward. We have a bootstrap script to deploy company-managed skills to each developer's "personal" skills. Hooks for codex and claude code try to refresh the skills on each startup.
• vkvkakal 26d ago
  I recently completely overhauled repo’s skill setup. I tried to control the execution of tasks performed by each project using claude.md within the project, but claude.md is only read at the beginning of each session, so it felt like the instructions weren’t being properly reflected. So I revised the strategy to manage frequently used features in skill units. In doing so, instead of organizing skills by project, it was structured to be integrated into the general skills of the individual repo. When skills are spread out across multiple projects and the number increases, it becomes impossible to keep track of which skills are available, so they end up not being used. I also think that eventually, once Claude(model) advances, it will be able to replace most of the skills, so I believe registering and managing countless skills actually degrades performance.
• RALaBarge 26d ago
  Any skills, I just add into the tool itself. I then have the py tools in their PWD, don’t bother with mcp.
• WatchDog 26d ago
  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 26d ago
    For starters, if you repeat a specific prompt multiple times per day, you may save it as a skill.
    • LTL_FTC 26d 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 26d 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 26d 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 26d 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.
• adastra22 26d ago
  Skills are no longer useful.
  • prettyblocks 26d ago
    I find them very useful.
    • adastra22 26d ago
      I have been finding them decreasing in the effectiveness with each model release. We got rid of skills and built a determinist harness around the agent instead.
      • prettyblocks 25d ago
        I use skills to automate non-development workflows, like for malware analysis, etc.
• ssivark 26d ago
  To the extent that skills are contextual guidance (for this author, this project, etc) and not just (raw) capabilities they are unlikely to be eaten by models. I maintain all my skill files in a central location (like dotfile management) and have guix home sync it to the skill folders of various harnesses that I'm playing with (codex, pi, antigravity, Claude Code, Deepseek harness, etc). They're set up to be bidirectional links rather than read-only like the default configuration, so I can keep editing them / adding to the corpus from any harness. This works well for skills since all harnesses expect the same format, but is more annoying for other features. EDIT: This is actually an example of a potentially useful skill. You might choose to manage your skills slightly differently. All you need to do is write a skill-management skill for your agents to be able to wire things up correctly / access them for edits. Some other nifty skills/plugins in my experience: render latex equations, cetz diagrams inline, jujutsu, guix, code reviewer, writing feedback.
  • killix 25d ago
    [flagged]
  • ssivark 25d ago
    Don't know why the below comment by killix got flagged; it's a legitimate point. In the current version of my setup, I've decided to accept that tradeoff. But it would also be interesting to check whether agent behavior can be controlled well enough by a skill-management skill telling them to synchronously commit any changes with their signature; that would get the best of both worlds.
    • rahimnathwani 24d ago
      "Don't know why the below comment by killix got flagged" Because it's obviously written by AI.
• patleeman 26d ago
  I use an agent plugin spec repo. Codex is already compatible with it and it supports skills + MCP definitions. https://agent-plugins.org/ https://agent-plugins.org/
• mercurialsolo 26d ago
  One of the engineers I know is building this product called SkillEd for just this. Lemme know if you need an invite
• mr-karan 26d ago
  [dead]
• pletnes 26d ago
  I have my skills in my dotfiles repo, then symlink them to my home directory and/or projects where I want to use them. Project specific ones go into the project.
• winternewt 26d ago
  I keep my skills in a Home Manager repo and install them into my .claude / .codex / whathaveyou directory through the home manager config. I'll know if they don't work because they are specific instructions on how to git commit, how to merge code, how to author text (without the typical AI tells), or API usage documentation for specific libraries, etc. If they didn't work the agent would do things incorrectly and I'd notice. And sometimes it doesn't follow the instructions well. I have a skill for that too: it tells the agent, given what it knows about attention and LLM:s in general, to evaluate the instructions and the mistake the LLM made, try to diagnose why it didn't follow the instructions as expected, and come up with an improvement of the skill based on that diagnosis.
• politician 26d ago
  I wrote a small command-line tool that installs skill packs into agent-specific project folders. It works pretty much like `brew` (or any package manager, really). The skills are compiled into the binary so that I don't have to worry about where they're located and can quickly move the skills between machines by copying the tool. Making sure they actually work? Trial and error, mostly. I know some folks have tried auto-researcher approaches, but I haven't found that to be the best use of time in my work.
• vira28 26d ago
  Instead of managing skills as files, I have been using a simple utility which helps me create, update/attach skills and finally search it across sessions https://github.com/viggy28/recall/ https://github.com/viggy28/recall/
• Sherveen 26d ago
  I have a repo/project called Loadouts & Summons. It has a primary skill, `capsule`. All skills, MCPs, CLIs, etc. live inside of it. I have it symlinked to all my dev machines so that it doesn't have to be an MCP. `capsule` is then progressive to dozens of skills/tools thru `capsule` -- ex. `$capsule plannotator [args]`. In some harnesses, I make it human-invoke only, and call it directly. In others, I let the model invoke it, and it has a top-level description that hints at what's inside. Maximal context/session start control and capability extension.
• chandureddyvari 26d ago
  I commit them to git(so complete team leverages them)., each repo has kind of different skills and the skills are the ones which I update at least twice a week. I’ve skills on how to add instrumentation , debug, code, code review, tech design review etc. I found most of the skills I find on skills.sh are not very useful for me., but I browse occasionally to get some inspiration. One more paradigm I’m seeing good results on adding new skills is ‘how to do X’, for instance ‘how to add logs’., “how to review code” etc., if i’m not able to frame it that way I don’t think it’s a good use case for me to add that skill to the llm arsenal. Another thing i discovered is less is more (in case of skills as well)., don’t add lots of skills., keep them very handful - I’ve got 9 skills so far (many people have 100s installed from marketplaces and plugins)
  • floriangoebel 26d ago
    Thats exactly how I use skills as well and I got great results with it. I work in a proprietary codebase with a lot of niche or custom tooling, weird technical details and historical quirks. What skills do for me, is essentially skip the "learning" phase of an agent working in the codebase. With a fitting skill the agent does not need to read the tooling docs, look at existing repos and learn the coding style, but it can get to work immediately. This is probably less relevant for code that exists a ton in the LLM training data already as an llm is probably competent to some degree in that anyway. A big caveat here is though that now you need to treat your skills repo very carefully as mistakes in there can easily spread to all of the new code you write using a coding agent.
• starefossen 26d ago
  For the my branch of the Norwegian Government we have a public skill registry and a tool to sync them locally according to what «profile» you select, https://ki-utvikling.nav.no/verktoy https://ki-utvikling.nav.no/verktoy Source at navikt/copilot
• lazy_afternoons 26d ago
  I have a separate repo which has to be pulled locally and the skills and agents are sym linked to projects.
• theletterf 26d ago
  We keep the skills in a repo, where an agentic workflow runs biweekly to check if their content drifted compared to the docs and opens PRs if they did. The repo is also a Claude plugin. The biggest problem is keeping skills up to date across users, so I developed a small Go binary that takes care of that across harnesses.
  • mstr32 26d ago
    That's very cool. How does the binary keep skills updated across users?
    • theletterf 26d ago
      It clones the skills repo if not present and relies on the git last commit as the "version".
• daitangio 26d ago
  Openspec has a subcommand (init) to manage them: clever because they provide also an update path.
• asedali 26d ago
  Why do you think like that? "I believe skills will eventually be eating by model capabilities, but until then I'm just looking for a better way to manage things."
• mstr32 26d ago
  The main problem I encountered around this is that skills need to be edited across projects and across team members in a controlled way. Git is of course required for this but is not enough so I built a tool to do just that: https://github.com/genged/capshelf https://github.com/genged/capshelf Using capshelf I manage my skills across projects. When I start a new project I can just: $ capshelf add security-review From the skill repo. And if I create a new skill I can promote it to the repo so everyone can install it: $ capshelf promote security-review It pins the skill content hash so there are no unexpected edits that can break your flow. It also supports MCP configs and agent configs.
• alexhans 26d ago
  - I don't find skills, I create them - Keep them organised in software repos that you install with symlinks for all coding harnesses that you have. Progressive disclosure based on the frontmatter does the rest. - I make sure they work with AI evals. Think of them like integration tests to prove behaviour. They're useful to optimize your flows. I try to make my skills be mostly a translation between natural language and good small fast tools that they call. - I change them as a new problem arises. Not just because. Skills can't be eaten by model capabilities if skills represent a workflow that is custom to my team or my person. I wrote about a good mental model in the past: https://alexhans.github.io/posts/series/evals/building-agent-skills-incrementally.html https://alexhans.github.io/posts/series/evals/building-agent...
  • stingraycharles 26d ago
    People always say this about the evals, but I find it hard to have a practical implementation of such a thing where you won’t end up spending 100x the amount of time on the evals than building the skill itself. Like, ok, I have a debugging skill, now how do I make evals except for the most trivial things?
    • TobTobXX 26d ago
      A skill should only document behaviour the LLM didn't/couldn't exhibit on its own. So you take your failed case (eg. working with gdb or whatever), write a skill and then test for that failed case.
      • hakunin 26d ago
        There are also skills that help LLM do the thing it can do without the skill, but faster (by cutting out unnecessary discovery). I guess for such skills the fail case is "being slow"? I imagine many fail cases can burn a lot of tokens/usage/time because failing LLMs can be very persistent. Maybe some upper bound (turn count, timeout) would help too.
    • RicDan 26d ago
      You don't. If you're using skills to force the AI to fullfill some must criterias, it's not going to work. Must criterias need deterministic checks -> be it hooks or what not. This is also my biggest gripe with AI. I.e. for specifications, no matter what hype machine I tried, it never fulfilled my criterias, which are: easily verifiable, concise, small specs. Hence I built https://github.com/RicardoMonteiroSimoes/Yamlet https://github.com/RicardoMonteiroSimoes/Yamlet initially for claude code, but then decided to use extend it for pi.dev. I now have a dedicated docker image for pi.dev, that only contains Yamlet plugin, and whenever I work on spec I spin it up. The end result is a .yaml file that easily works in git + git diff, so that I can then proceed with the technical specs-
• oliviayii 26d ago
  [dead]
• rcarmo 26d ago
  My agents use https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/memento/ https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/memento/ to manage shared skills and propose changes. But I also have template projects with skills baked in for some scenarios.
• yatsyk 26d ago
  Skills live in two source-of-truth git repos (private and public). Agents edit skills by my request, and syncs to all coding agents ~/.claude/skills/, ~/.codex/skills, ~/.pi/agent/skills, ~/.config/opencode/skills etc. with agent written sync-agent-skill script. script ensures that no local changes was made in-place.
  • r0b05 26d ago
    Why do you use so many different agents if I may ask?
    • yatsyk 26d ago
      I mainly use Claude Code, but I had an idea to build an orchestrator for coding agents, so I experimented with several
  • KerrickStaley 26d ago
    Codex and Claude Code both respect ~/.agents/skills; you don't need to have ~/.codex/skills and ~/.claude/skills .
  • killix 25d ago
    [flagged]
• matsemann 26d ago
  Skills is just a tech bro word for a simple markdown file with instructions. No need to over complicate it. Write down things you feel like re-using. Like how to specifically implement something in your system ("when adding a new API endpoint we need to do x y and z", or "when making a github PR we tag Æ and Å") so you don't have to repeat it. And I mostly add it in cases where it didn't infer it itself. So very reactive, not proactive. Most public skills are useless and over complicated. Lots of people are spending too much time on their harness, than actually making stuff. Edit: but do get inspired by public ones. For instance a "grill me" skill can ve be useful, but I find the public one very mumbo-jumbo. But the idea of forcing the agent to ask clarifying questions is good.
  • sriniwasx 26d ago
    [dead]
  • hypfer 26d ago
    My genuine question is: Are there any "skills" at all that have proven to be useful? And if so, what's the context? Because, for me anyway, LLMs usually do one thing, and that then produces a durable artifact. So the prompt that got me there by that point expired and is not really needed anymore. I also occasionally have recurring tasks (rarely though), but there, the prompt to do stuff is embedded in code that orchestrates the doing, so I have no use-case for that either. ___ For the "add this endpoint" example you've described, I just throw commit IDs at the clanker and say "go do that again". That works, and doesn't decouple knowledge from code.
  • Achshar 26d ago
    I believe skills are much more than a simple markdown file with instructions. They are a very powerful script engine. How I organize it is that of course there's a markdown with instructions but I split the work in a hybrid of script + instructions. So all the work that can be deterministic is a python script api surface and all the logical or thinking work is in instructions. and agent is also instructed on how to use the api of the python helper functions. This makes it almost like a normal script but the runtime is a harness and the business logic can be any combination of code + human-level intelligence. So I like to do all the edge case handling and validation etc via a helper function, and the agent is simply instructed to call the function to do something. It is extremely powerful and a completely different way of automating things. I am constantly forced to re-think how computers are supposed to work and its limitations.
• matheusmoreira 26d ago
  I create and refine my own skills and commit them to my dotfiles repository.
• rctlabs 26d ago
  [flagged]
• Kwpolska 26d ago
  Skills that are so generic that you can find them on the internet, and which you think can be replaced by model improvements, are useless, possibly even harmful, considering how much the models get clingy to the context. Useful skills describe workflows specific to your project, and they can live in the project repo for everyone to use and improve.
• ramon156 26d ago
  Disclaimer: I hand curate them in the end I keep most of my sessions in Zed (you can import them there anyway). After some big feature I let a frontier agent go over these sessions and suggest improvements. Typically I use gemini for this because it's really good at pruning text. Claude/GPT really wants to append more text for some reason. I end up with smaller skills but more "actioned" skills. They kind of force the agent to do things the way that works well.
• backtr4ck 26d ago
  I run AI on my server. All skills and relevant info is saved to a Wiki. Agent only has an instruction to check the wiki (MCP) at the beginning and get the necessary context.
• solomaker282 26d ago
  [flagged]
• jve 26d ago
  Last week I had to reuse homemade skills on different project. I very much liked the AI proposed solution and it works quite well: ship as a plugin and add your git repo as a marketplace. The installation is effortless and I don't have to mess with symlinks as I may be working with same codebase on different platforms which would make things.. different. codex plugin marketplace add "https://path-to-my-git-repo" codex plugin add agent-tools@mycompany claude plugin marketplace add "https://path-to-my-git-repo" claude plugin install agent-tools@mycompany Let the AI generate .json files for marketplace. Haven't got to these bits yet, but I'm sure they will work as easy as install does. claude plugin marketplace update mycompany claude plugin update agent-tools@mycompany
• meerita 26d ago
  Here's how I do it: - Explanation: https://www.minid.net/2026/7/14/how-to-automatise-with-ai https://www.minid.net/2026/7/14/how-to-automatise-with-ai - Git source: https://github.com/meerita/monorepo-nextjs-golang-rust-python-ai-rules https://github.com/meerita/monorepo-nextjs-golang-rust-pytho...
• dakolli 26d ago
  With a custom skills workspace in mininote https://mininote.ink/docs/mcp-docs https://mininote.ink/docs/mcp-docs Agent can use mcp to update its own skills, or I can copy template skills into local dorectories via the api. Very useful, like notion on steroids but is completely free.
• sznio 26d ago
  I don't use them. Everything is organised into repos, i select the directories with the context the agent needs for the task. If I want it to adjust something in my homelab, I drop it into the homelab repo. Stuff agents need to do commonly has shell scripts to speed it up. I do however have some system prompts. I pick the prompt based on the goal, whether I want to implement something, or just web search, or just need a short one-off command to be done.
• repeekad 26d ago
  Lookup the Claude managed agents architecture for skills, they have a kind of progressive exposure where skills have a title that triggers the skill, an index file that is loaded when triggered, and additional files and scripts that are available once triggered but not loaded by default.
• SillyUsername 26d ago
  5 Stages using local GIT (no remote, don't need it) to prevent preloading in the prompt: 1. A single Skill finder skill, loaded in the prompt, prevents having to import all the summaries in the prompt the harness would add. Uses git's own search. 2. Private repo, per agent, contains main (production) and draft-<name of skill> branches. 3. Shared repo, like 2, but general access for all group agents. 4. Fallback mode, search the harness for skills using the harness mechanism when a relevant skill cannot be found. 5. Skill audit cron. Identify junk skills / drafts that have never changed / not in any recent sessions history, and categorise monthly for me to decide. This means it's compatible with existing skill folders, removal of git and the finder skill is non destructive and critically debloats the prompt of skills that aren't used and lazy loads them when needed.
• hypercube33 26d ago
  I'm on mobile but the first skill I made was a skill improvement skill. This is basically stating that if the AI struggles in another skill but finds a way that the skill it used needs reworking and it needs to do so. There is a rule to always use this skill and then track notes in a version file. Then back it up in a share folder or external drive. Skills have made my tools immensely better, cheaper to use and faster. I've also added to it that it should write scripts it can just use in the future to do tasks like query information it needs to answer questions. I wish there was a better way to share these over a team but I haven't taken that time yet.
• anygivnthursday 26d ago
  If I have a session with something that I expect to do it again, I ask Claude to make a skill out of it and store at user level somewhere at ~./claude/skills I think, so next time I can do just "/xyreport from-to" for example and dont have worry about leaving out things from the prompt or to rediscover some gotchas the agent ran into.
• DarmokTanagra 26d ago
  [dead]
• hellectronic 26d ago
  I am testing out Skillshare https://skillshare.runkids.cc https://skillshare.runkids.cc and I am using skills.sh to find skills. You can have your own skill repository with Skillshare and sync across agents (symlinks or copys).
• toffelx 26d ago
  I have created a little system for this, placed directly in the ~.<youragent>/skills folder. I have a configuration file of marketplaces and other skills to fetch, it can look like. I have my own marketplaces as well, including ones from my company. I use vercel's tool for managing skills with npx, but to easily handle specifically _which_ skills to fetch, the config file is set up as follows: SOURCES = { 'some-marketplace-name': [ 'some-skill', 'another-skill', 'yet-another', ], 'https://designsystem.yourcompany.com': [], (empty list: fetch all skills) } from there I simply run "skills.py" (a single helper) to clean/fetch updated versions of the skills.
• FailMore 26d ago
  Surprised it has not been mentioned, but I think relying on https://github.com/vercel-labs/skills https://github.com/vercel-labs/skills is sound. It handles global installs for a wide range of coding agents. If I was working on an internal only skill I'd probably still use the same foundation.
• dstracted 26d ago
  [dead]
• sinuhe69 26d ago
  When I work on a new problem and the agent struggles with it, I will ask the agent to distill the knowledge and experiences it gained during the session into a skill file. Then I review and publish it depends on the assistant system. I find this is an effective way for the agents to learn new skills, both from its own discoveries but also from my steering and the mistakes it made. If you work in a niche or on special problems, this template could be useful.
• pdantix 26d ago
  the only ones {i use,claude decides to use} regularly come with claude code plugins so they automatically update. i just define the marketplaces and plugins in my .claude/settings.json for the project.
• lendha930 26d ago
  [flagged]
• qznc 26d ago
  We have an ongoing discussion and some fans of https://microsoft.github.io/apm/ https://microsoft.github.io/apm/ Because it's from Microsoft and sounds sufficiently enterprisey probably.
• avaer 26d ago
  Skills are mostly snake oil, the way people use them (the aspiration to download kung foo from a celebrity). There was a time when maybe it mattered (last year), but with good repos and good prompts today's agents can find exactly what they need without any skills. "Skills" as developer macros can be useful, but at most those are things shared with the team (in the repo), not something you download from the internet. If you have so many skills that you feel the need to manage them, that's a code smell.
  • igor_nast 26d ago
    100% - influencers pretend they know something and produce all in one skills pack - that doesn't make sense
    • walthamstow 25d ago
      Great way to go viral though
  • JauntyHatAngle 26d ago
    Yes, skills as a "portable power" isn't really the use case for me unless it's entirely generic and even then sparingly. I've mostly followed what anthropic suggests, which is putting less into context and more into skills, to keep the "how" out of context until it is needed to reduce context bloat. Skills have some instructions but are primarily informed repo specific instructions and keep their context away from the rest of the repo to keep things sanitised for me. I've found it to be useful in that context.
    • tetha 26d ago
      > Skills have some instructions but are primarily informed repo specific instructions and keep their context away from the rest of the repo to keep things sanitised for me. Skills and agents in the Claude world can also be extended and evolved over time, as they are committed "code". For example, we have an agent which can take a statement or a support ticket and identifies the services, tenants and infrastructure components likely meant in the ticket or request. Similar to a skill, Claude can invoke this on demand in a conversation. This started very simple, but various people spent time tuning it over the last 4-6 months. They have "taught" it to pick up on jargon from different departments, writing style of different departments, how they think about their systems. With all of that tuning over time it has become quite "clever" in identifying the mentioned systems and - if requested - the train of thought leading to this conclusion. Similar things are happening with skills for various task, be it Ansible integration tests, upgrade chores and so on. The first version can be fairly underwhelming, but continuously improving it after each usage can make them very powerful.
• shelune 26d ago
  Not really related but I wonder how people benchmark the effectiveness of skills/agents? I'm seeing the agent working quite fine with just direct prompting and the agent doing things by itself rather than using skills. Is it better for certain task size?
• ziofill 26d ago
  I’ve tried to keep up with “best practices” around AI use, but things are improving so quickly that I’ve largely given up. The vanilla agents are just fine for my needs as they come.
  • BOOSTERHIDROGEN 26d ago
    Can you elaborate more how do you setup vanilla agents ? Which agents you use and which use case that it’s greatly show benefit for you. Thanks
    • ziofill 25d ago
      That’s what I’m saying, I don’t set it up. I just install Claude code and I’m good to go. Managing configuration files feels like worrying about fine-tuning in 2023
• lendha930 26d ago
  [flagged]
• shermantanktop 26d ago
  I don’t seem much point to intentionally curating a set of skills, and specifically invoking them by name, only to watch the ai skip them all and do better by just reading code and internal/external websites.
• brokegrammer 26d ago
  I don't use skills unless I have something specific to tell the agent. For example, if I want the agent to use Tailwind V3 instead of V4, I'll have a skill for that. Or, if I want the agent to always use the repository pattern for database access, I'll create a skill for that. I don't need to manage skills files because I have so few of them and they're only a couple lines long.
• jiaosdjf 26d ago
  WTF is a "skill"? I really think people are getting ahead of themselves here. You wrote some bullet points so your agent harness doesn't keep making builds in the wrong environment? You have a very specific debugging setup? Your agent doesn't understand when to rebase? README is where you should be writing anything specific to your project, and if you're worried about context size then your README is too long, it should be just enough information for any competent dev or agent to get the gist of how you do things around here and where to look for deeper answers. If your particular harness / orchestrator is just not pushing back enough or can't seem to solve certain problems then thats a tool issue, either edit the tool system prompts or move to better tools or models. Calling this 'skills' is disingenuous, this word was chosen by marketers and implies some kind of deeper learning. I'm not saying there's no value in tuning prompts, but your 'skills' should be managed in only 2 ways: 1. It's specific to your project, it's a README, or 2. It's specific to your tooling, it's part of config, system prompts etc.
  • invaliduser 25d ago
    I mainly use them as macros. Not even an advanced and smart macro system, just plain basic macros to avoid copy-pasting recurrent prompts. Is there more to them?
  • 8note 25d ago
    a skill gets injected into context in a certain way, and behaves in certain ways with respect to things like compaction. the readme and agent.md are not the right places to put long workflows worth of llm instructions, and also isnt the right place to put global details. skills also get a piece of text injected into context all the time, so the agent gets a hint to go read and follow the whole thing, without needing to embed the whole definition into context all of the time.
• 0xbadcafebee 26d ago
  Don't find them. Ask the AI to do something. When it does it correctly, ask it to make a skill for it. Clear the session, try to use the skill, fix any problems found, modify your repo and harness if necessary. Repeat until skill works 0-shot. Improve with the same process. This largely works with a specific model, specific harness, specific prompt, specific context. You may need to modify your agent harness to manage skills depending on runtime parameters. Pi is a great general purpose agent for the these modifications. If you do find other skills and want to use them, put them through the loop above. But keep in mind that since they were created in their own circumstances, they may not work in yours. Also separate rules from skills. Rules tell AI when to do things, skills tell AI how to do things. Tool call/MCP limitations, agent configurations, and harness extensions, can help it stay on track.
  • imadtaieber 25d ago
    Im talking about skills like design critique, landing page creation....ect
• yunbiao 26d ago
  [dead]
• jdxcode 26d ago
  for skills related to specific cli tools, i just wrote a standard for this! it's obviously not widely used yet, but since mise will support installing the skills alongside the tool, i suspect it will have decent adoption i used to be a bit bearish on skills—thinking that llms should just use --help, but i've come around on that. i think skills are a great way to describe higher level workflows that use multiple commands. https://jdx.dev/posts/2026-09-05-introducing-packslip/ https://jdx.dev/posts/2026-09-05-introducing-packslip/
• dankobgd 26d ago
  how did stupid markdown file become a thing, this industry really went to shit.
  • hn993302 25d ago
    Should be .txt
• soapdog 26d ago
  by not having them at all.
• iamflimflam1 26d ago
  The internet has broken me. Whenever I see a question like this i now automatically expect it to be some marketing attempt. There will be a product/service/blog post somewhere in the comments.
• maxim-fin 26d ago
  Nowadays I often create skills myself (or with the aid of coding assisants) for any repeating tasks. For example, I use my own skill to make Claude CLI send the worktree to codex cli for the review, then read the verdict and make changes
• srijanshukla18 26d ago
  I've got a skill repository on github, and I got a hermes automation to sync skills repo - this hermes automation is on every device. Any skills I make on the fly - my global AGENTS.md has instructions to update the skills repo path and place them appropriately in there.
• cowanon77 26d ago
  Personally I have found "meta-prompting" to be much more useful than any pre-canned set of skills. Simply ask the AI (inside of a workspace already set up): Create a standalone prompt to <xyz> The latest AIs will print out a long prompt with all of the assumptions, tools, and general files it plans to use. Review that, and then run the whole prompt in a new context.
• sdevonoes 26d ago
  Never understood the “skills” part tbh. Thse models are being trained in trillions of texts. Adding something small and particular about my codebase doesn’t really move the needle
  • dude250711 25d ago
    I think it's developers coping with not coding anymore. There is this urge to create a non-ephemeral library of at least something.
• songhonglei1985 26d ago
  [flagged]
• acdc-controller 25d ago
  [dead]
• sornaensis 25d ago
  I don't like skills. It's a really annoying form of technical debt, especially when people try to fill up company repos with random skills they think are so cool. Same goes for polluting a repo with custom instructions. I only want the model to have the tools it needs to get the job I ask of it done.
• invaliduser 25d ago
  I basically create a skill when I'm tired of always writing the same prompts, and then I adapt it over time. I have like 3 skills, and so far so good, most of my recent changes have been asking Claude to please stop using metaphors and creative figures of speech that make the documents so much harder to read and understand (maybe it's only annoying to non-native speakers, I don't know)
• gregwebs 25d ago
  Get them under version control. I have a git repo with my skills for software development [1]. There is an installer script that symlinks to the skills. Updating the skills on a machine is then just a matter of advancing the git repo. One of the skills comes with some bash scripts, but the rest are effectively just prompts. Putting project specific skills in projects works well. I make sure they work by understanding every skill, reviewing pull requests, and testing the end product. The result is rarely perfect, so I am constantly tweaking the skills and how I use AI. [1] https://github.com/gregwebs/skills-sdlc/ https://github.com/gregwebs/skills-sdlc/
• rsingh888 25d ago
  [dead]
• rsingh888 25d ago
  [dead]
• sformisano 25d ago
  SkillCatalog (https://skillcatalog.dev/ https://skillcatalog.dev/) - stored in git, managed via desktop app (macos) and and CLI full disclosure: I'm the author
• skeledrew 25d ago
  I mostly prompt my own skills, and add a self-improvement directive (to those I think can use it). Usually if a skill isn't working (well) there will be extra tool calls. Actually that's usually the trigger to create a skill in the first place: multiple tool calls to do a repetitive task, where those tool calls can be reduced. But from comments on most AI-related posts, people are hardly-if-ever reading the agent transcripts (and the self improvement directive doesn't always get triggered) so their skills never improve.
• leej111 25d ago
  [dead]
• suemto 25d ago
  [dead]
• adadmliller 25d ago
  [dead]
• kaizenb 25d ago
  I manage them in a GH repo in synch with local, with regular checks and updates. https://github.com/boraoztunc/skills https://github.com/boraoztunc/skills
• ekns 25d ago
  I haven't used skills files at all. I think my codebase scaffolding and AGENTS.md just kind of does everything I need. E.g. https://github.com/eliask/lawvm/blob/master/AGENTS.md https://github.com/eliask/lawvm/blob/master/AGENTS.md EDIT: Ah, but what I do instead is I constantly refer to my various public essays. I think it's very useful to have externalized thinking like that available for use with LLM contexts.
• hoffiez 25d ago
  [dead]
• someguynamedq 25d ago
  Skills are workflow caches
• _pdp_ 25d ago
  GitHub. Then you symlink them into the relevant folders. You can write a skill to manage them for you across all harnesses as well.
  • imadtaieber 25d ago
    going to do that, very helpful!
• edf13 25d ago
  One thing to consider when you do look at how you manage your installed skills - is the security side of them. You also need to manage the authority of each skill too. Signed skills is a step in the right direction, but it only proves provenance and doesn't prove behavior. (Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49597166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49597166)
• bhkdotdev 25d ago
  > "make sure they actually work?" I've been working on a tool (https://dynobox.xyz https://dynobox.xyz) that acts as a deterministic integration test / behavioral test layer for some of the skills i've been working on / sharing. It feels like a full eval suite is a bit heavy handed and really all I care about is if certain files are touched / left alone or if my skill is actually read. The tooling has much more functionality built in if you want to check it out! For skill files / prompts I share I make sure that I use the cross harness functionality since I use codex but a bunch of my coworkers use claude (and then one using antigravity...)
• ajjobsearch 25d ago
  [flagged]
• bjconlan 25d ago
  I have an old colleague who I've been leaning on for ai things (they're more on the pulse than I) who uses cue (cuelang.org) for distributing and formalizing a set of skills/prompts. It's the best thing I've come across (that I don't need to mange myself) https://github.com/p3bot/start https://github.com/p3bot/start The tool itself does more than just manage skills/prompts but I found that part of it particularly good (well new to me; not familiar with cue but the idea seems like a good fit)
• mark_l_watson 25d ago
  I need to manage skill files across 2 Macs and 1 VPS, and also across fast inferencing APIs vs. very slow local models. The first dimension is easy: I simply keep copies of debugged skill files in iCloud and copy them where I need them. The second dimension is where I spend my time: I use short skill files for fast inference APIs and tiny skill files when I am running slow local models, and I simply spend a lot of time writing and tuning tiny skills files. Of course, with increasingly better models, skill files become less relevant, but not totally irrelevant.
  • imadtaieber 25d ago
    I find myself spending a lot of time updating skills, which is not wasted time, since they are at the system design level work. It's how I automate myself ;)
• mkyounis 25d ago
  [flagged]
• glub 25d ago
  I only use skills that are docs of software. Anything else is pure garbage. They get pinned with nix together with the software that they come from. It's just two 3rd party skills now: playwright-cli and herdr. All the rest are skills for the software itself, so they live in the same repo and get updated the same way docs get updated.
• tesnorindian 25d ago
  I use SKILLS.md to define workflows rather than having instructions in them. Like, delete the foreign keys in the database before loading the table using AWS DMS for CDC. This is required because LLM may not be aware of why we are deleting the foreign keys in the DB in the first place. The SKILLS.md helps the LLM to identify the tables for which foreign keys needs to be deleted before they are loaded by DMS for CDC.
  • Ro_K 25d ago
    I like this usecase, I could have used it myself. But I actually moved out of DMS to OLake, its open source and gives ways to operate it via both UI and CLI. But thanks for sharing this!
• thih9 25d ago
  [dead]
• estetlinus 25d ago
  I am yet to find a skill useful. It’s usually just vibecoded slop-bloat for a one-off somebody thought they document in a markdown file.
  • hn993302 25d ago
    They're useful for one-offs. I don't manage them though.
• slartibardfast0 25d ago
  i use an agentic host folder, full methodology here: github.com/connollydavid/host i then A/B test skills for terseness with weco’s auto-research within this using a much weaker model e.g. Qwen 3.5 4B
• inopinatus 25d ago
  5% git 95% rm
• pglevy 25d ago
  Mostly use homegrown skills. For shared skillset at work, it's a standalone repo with a script for everyone to install the full set. For a personal collection I also use a script to sync a few upstream ones to keep everything in one place. For evals I use the method outlined in the `skill-creator` skill from Anthropic. In the skills, I try to use scripts, along with templates and json worksheets, as much as possible to scaffold and validate the work to make things more consistent and reliable.
• Udo 25d ago
  A few simple rules worked for me: - start with zero skills - add a skill if you encounter behavior that you want to ward against or if you want to associate a meaningful phrase with a certain method of doing things - NEVER copy a skill from someone, do not clone skills repos, do not let LLMs write their own skills - occasionally revise or delete a skill, less is more
• torunar 25d ago
  I usually rm -rf them.
• fallinditch 25d ago
  I read somewhere that Boris (created Claude Code) recommends deleting skills, and hooks every so often and then observe how the LLM performs without them. Maybe better to periodically prune: tweak some skills, shorten some, delete some.
  • synergy20 25d ago
    observing changes is slow and very subjective. i ask ai itself to update skill once a while
  • tstrimple 25d ago
    I have CC do a review / audit of my entire CC stack and architecture every major model / harness release for recommended changes. What goes into my CLAUDE.md files has been shrinking over time. There is a skill review tool as well which helps determine how effective they are.
  • sinuhe69 24d ago
    Skills are for me special knowledges that an agent in general doesn’t know in details: using a specific framework, create reports, new programming languages etc. So having them not only enable the AI to work more effectively but also more efficiently and cheaper (why digging through the ten thousands lines of help again if it was already distilled?). I don’t use SKILLs for quirks and gotcha. They go into AGENTS.md because it’s always loaded and therefore much more reliable (there is a study about it). I consider SKILLs load-on-demand even though the agents can discover it and decide to load by itself.
• bastawhiz 25d ago
  Treat skills as runbooks, not as a way to turn your agent into an expert.
• nickreese 25d ago
  I think people undervalue skills on the cross repo boundaries and how systems interact with other systems. For instance… how to deploy a service or new service’a docker container. Get secrets in value blind, manage secrets value blind. Those sorts of things have been wildly valuable. Also due to the nature of skills and how they are pulled in by your harness they can really prime the context in a way that is really useful to agent autonomy if that is your thing.
• songhonglei1985 25d ago
  reduce and simplifies your skills periodically . And use workflow to separate skills ,not by functionality . The workflow would be simplified but will always be useful as long as business runs. Such as the software could be build by C/C++/Java/Go/Python but the workflow based on software keeps live.
• mceachen 25d ago
  Have your agent make a plugin marketplace -- mine is here (feel free to crib): https://github.com/photostructure/coding-skills https://github.com/photostructure/coding-skills Be sure to increment unofficial plugin versions when you make edits: codex's auto-update works reasonably well, claude not so much, but when asked, both can fix their own config. And like others have said, imho the skills that are incanted as macros are much more reliably useful. I use my technical project plan skill suite in 90% of my sessions via direct reference, and the stage -> cross-model second-opinion review is how I land all my commits.
  • threecheese 25d ago
    Codex and Claude Code support plugin symlinks for local development; if you don’t mind keeping a local clone of your skills repo they can just use it. Claude needs a shim, as it wants to cache plugins; it’ll run a shell command (!) locally to get the plugin path. Codex supports this natively. Here’s the spec I used for my skills repo: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d37077a6-2cdd-4961-b504-b7b1c6c0711c https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d37077a6-2cdd-4961-b504-b...
• woadwarrior01 25d ago
  You might want to look at this CLI that Tencent released recently. https://github.com/Tencent/teamai-cli https://github.com/Tencent/teamai-cli
• ArthaudMe 25d ago
  [flagged]
• dyauspitr 25d ago
  It’s all nonsense. Just ask it for what you want with natural language. Why would you want to reintroduce all the random magic incantations we’ve had in tech for decades.
• theahura 25d ago
  First, a lot of people in thread are saying you don't need skills. This is pretty wrong. There is a lot of alpha in using any set of skills that implements SPACE (search, plan, assert, code, evaluate). See: https://open.substack.com/pub/theahura/p/agentics-using-metacognition-to-get https://open.substack.com/pub/theahura/p/agentics-using-meta... Second, we share all of our sets of skills in a purpose built registry: https://noriskillsets.dev/ https://noriskillsets.dev/ you can use any of our public skillsets from there. If you're on a team you can also sign up to get your own private registry. Makes organization much easier. Finally, for local development, we use this CLI to manage skills (https://github.com/tilework-tech/nori-skillsets https://github.com/tilework-tech/nori-skillsets). This is a tool that lets you bundle skills into groups, and then switch between those groups. So for eg if I'm making a slide deck I'll use an admin skillset, and for coding I'll use a swe skillset, and for debugging I'll use a debugging skillset. We do keep tinkering with our skillsets, but not very much. I don't get the need to adjust things for every model release, doesn't seem necessary for us in practice
  • bensyverson 25d ago
    I'm building something similar with `Agents`[0] (think of it as a package manager for AGENTS.md snippets). I'm getting good results by including detailed instructions for certain tasks in the repo, and providing hints in AGENTS.md about when to use them. It's basically a simpler version of Skills—but it feels like AGENTS.md adherence is higher than Skill adherence. [0]: https://github.com/bensyverson/agents/ https://github.com/bensyverson/agents/
  • kramer2718 25d ago
    Can you compare what you have built with superpowers?
    • theahura 24d ago
      Yea, we like obra/superpowers a lot. For folks who are unaware, see: https://github.com/obra/superpowers https://github.com/obra/superpowers the original version of our high autonomy skillset was a fork of obra's superpowers back in...October? November? of last year. Whenever it first came out. I think basically all of the best skillsets implement SPACE, including superpowers, mattpocock skills, get shit done, etc. There are aesthetic reasons why you might prefer one over the other, but candidly I think any of them will get the job done and are strictly better than not using one of the SPACE skillsets. (I haven't played with the latest version of superpowers. My hunch is that on average our skillsets have better compliance rates with the models because of some of the ways in which we write the skills themselves, but its a hunch)
• JoelHsu 25d ago
  [dead]
• one-bank4326 25d ago
  [flagged]
• Neat_comfort007 25d ago
  [flagged]
• itsTyrion 25d ago
  wdym "your skills files"
• qsbuilder 25d ago
  [flagged]
• socketcluster 25d ago
  I make skills to allow AI to integrate with my platform; it's documentation with cURL commands. It can interact with every aspect of my platform via HTTP and access its full capabilities. I can tweak its token permissions as I like and revoke access if necessary.
• sotilrac 25d ago
  I use a handful of skills I keep in a repo (to track updates) with an install script. Mainly is to replicate them across my various dev computers, and to share them with the team. https://asmat.ca/blog/mad-skills/ https://asmat.ca/blog/mad-skills/
• vzaliva 25d ago
  I've used this to install some 3rd party skills: https://github.com/vercel-labs/skills https://github.com/vercel-labs/skills It allows to install and update skills. Caveat: It works for Claude Code and Codex, but does not work for Claude Desktop.
• darren0 25d ago
  Skills are encoding a process. The more niche the process the more useful the skill. As the process grows to a larger audience it becomes more generic and thus converges with the models knowledge. So skills are better for a smaller group of people. And similarly how it's packaged and maintained becomes specific to that group.
  • subeadia 22d ago
    This is it in a nutshell. Great advice.
• rgbrgb 25d ago
  tbh I use 1 custom skill (workflow for completing a github issue and opening dev server/PR) and have it checked-in to my main project repo. For me, it's like a dev script basically and gets that level of care. I don't need an eval... I'm the only user and I use it like 5 times a day.
• wseqyrku 25d ago
  I usually use this technology called Shift+Delete
• dev-in 25d ago
  [flagged]
• cainxinth 25d ago
  I find the whole Skills.md idea a little silly. We have a technology that struggles to stay within rails due to its inherent makeup. And you think you can fix that by just telling it to? It makes as much sense as the so-called “humanizer” tools that purport to make LLMs stop using their well-known verbal tells. All you are doing is saying: “Hey you know that thing you can’t stop doing? Can you stop doing that?” The machine will say “Absolutely!” but eventually start doing it again.
  • appplication 25d ago
    You’re not wrong, but I don’t see a lot of alternatives. So we just don’t try to fix it? At least skills give us a landing pad for “here’s how to attempt to do things consistently in a way I generally approve of”
• picklenerd 25d ago
  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
  • veryfancy 25d ago
    +1 to keeping ownership of skills defining just what I like and symlinking them in where I work.
  • kbos87 25d ago
    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.
    • chachachainsaw 24d ago
      Tracking skill usage like this is really smart, stealing this!
• nhod 25d ago
  I've been using a project called SX https://github.com/sleuth-io/sx https://github.com/sleuth-io/sx to manage them. It has its quirks, but overall I find it to be very useful. One thing I've had to write as a layer on top of it is a way to assemble agent-specific CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md from fragments. For example, I have a little fragment that has all agents respond to me in ordered list format. (Since they often ask a bunch of question all jumbled throughout a response, the ordered list format allows me to respond to those specific questions.) And I also have a growing anti-Claudeism fragment as well. Then I combine this with project-specific fragments and have it assembled into into a single CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md. The layer also does a little reporting on the length of the resulting files and notifies me if it ever grows beyond a certain size.
• cute_boi 25d ago
  i haven't written any skills and it works fine. I do use Agents.md for repo and that's all.
• alchemism 25d ago
  “Context Injection Library” might be more accurate than Skills per se.
• hn993302 25d ago
  I don't manage them, they just kinda rot
• mrbonner 25d ago
  There is a very similar connection in the relation of skills/mcp/… and everything related to a prompt: they are all just a special-purposed prompt named differently. In a way, it reminds me of the concept in OOO: we give lots of names to “design patterns”, even write books about it. But in the end, they’re all based on polymorphism. Know this fundamental and I feel less overwhelmed.
  • imadtaieber 25d ago
    Can you explain more? by the way Alan kay was right, tech is pop culture. We keep re-naming things.
• ryanSrich 25d ago
  Two ways I use skills 1. Personally - these are for apps I use like Codex. This one is pretty simple 2. For our product (which is mostly an internal tool, with minimial customer facing UI) - we have a skills factory that lets our employees create reusable instructions for our internal agent (fully custom built harness with routing). User describes the task and writes the instructions (can attach reference files, etc.). Custom skills and their versions are stored in postgres, with attachments in file storage. The assistant loads those instructions and references when it uses the skill. To update a shared skill, users edit a draft, test it, and submit it for review. Once approved, that version becomes live. Skills can learn or rewrite themselves from conversations (cuts a new draft and prompts the user if they want to update/improve the skill). EDIT: I should say that our employees have a particular set of expertise and knowledge that make skill sharing insanely useful. Which is why I took the time to build this out. It's helped reduce manual work, and has increased our AI usage drastically. We also measure AI output (in terms of quality) and the reduction in slop has sky rocketed.
• itubaj 25d ago
  I've put mine inside `~/.agents/skills` and `ln`ed all `skills` folders that I could to point to them. It only doesn't work for Claude Desktop. But it works for grok, antigravity and cc CLIs (for some, at least partially).
  • yokuze 25d ago
    It's a bit of a shameless plug, but I do hope it is helpful to you: I've been using this heavily the past 6 months to solve exactly this problem: https://github.com/a1st-dev/aix https://github.com/a1st-dev/aix It doesn't support Grok (yet) though.
    • itubaj 16d ago
      Oh, seems it supports Grok now. Seems very interesting. Will give it a try. Thanks!
• yehyal 25d ago
  I asked that question myself a couple of times, which is why I created a side project to answer it. I built Skill Grill, an open-source directory and community trust layer for AI agent skills. Its live now at https://skillgrill.dev https://skillgrill.dev I'm not sure about posting links in threads but this project needs community backing in order to work and its free :) Its still in MVP stage, but feedback is welcome
• blackhaj7 25d ago
  Anyone got a good flow for sharing their skills across their various repos and apps? I ideally want to have a single place I store my skills with an easy way to make them available to my repos, Amp and ChatGPT desktop/iOS, Grok web but can’t see a way
  • yokuze 25d ago
    Yes! See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49601053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49601053 Though it does not support ChatGPT (just the Codex part inside of the ChatGPT app), or Grok web (yet). But it does encourage you to keep versioned config in one spot. You can also commit repo-specific config to any project that has specific needs, and translate that config into . That can be helpful when working with a team or an open source project that needs to support a variety of agents/tools. It currently supports 8 editors/agents: https://aix.a1st.dev/editors/supported-editors/ https://aix.a1st.dev/editors/supported-editors/
    • blackhaj7 25d ago
      Nice! Will check it out, thanks
  • desquaredp_ 22d ago
    [dead]
• yokuze 25d ago
  I commit my standard set of agent configuration (including Skills) to this repo, similar to how many people have a "dotfiles" repo: https://github.com/yokuze/aix-config https://github.com/yokuze/aix-config Then, I use this tool: https://github.com/a1st-dev/aix https://github.com/a1st-dev/aix to keep my Claude, Codex, and OpenCode in sync with my config. The major benefits are that my adoption/deletion of skills, rules, hooks, MCP servers, etc. are deliberate, versioned, and shareable. And since aix allows you to create extensible configs, that aix-config public GitHub repo is my base set of rules, and my internal/employer-specific rules are just a small layer on top of that. It also makes trying out different subscriptions easy: you define your config in one place (one source of truth), and write to Claude, Codex, Devin, etc. with one command.
  • veb 25d ago
    interesting project mate. I have struggled with this as I built my workflow to rely on Claude, but when I put Codex into the mix it became a bit of a hassle, will check it out.
    • yokuze 25d ago
      Cheers! There's also a command you can run to convert your Claude config to what Codex expects: `aix sync claude-code --to codex --dry-run` (just drop the --dry-run flag if the result looks good to you). More here: https://aix.a1st.dev/editors/migrations/how-to-migrate-from-claude-code-to-codex/ https://aix.a1st.dev/editors/migrations/how-to-migrate-from-... Feel free to suggest any improvements or features you'd like to see, or let me know if you find any bugs.
• devolving-dev 25d ago
  Like you said, I think skills are quickly subsumed by model abilities. I leave relevant notes about my own projects in agents.md and local comments around tricky bits of code that need them, but otherwise I just use vanilla codex.
  • c0n5pir4cy 25d ago
    I think a lot of people are missing some of the advantages of skills - they're to give an agent/harness the knowledge of how to do something or more context without it always being part of the prompt. This could be to try and expand the capabilities of the model but in it can be used to store personal preference/workflow/organisational knowledge/improved efficiency etc. The harness could work through and build some of this on its own - but it's much more efficient if it has a document it can just look up. I use them for the database structure and it's quirks, how to use branded document templates, external document tone, system workflows, compliance requirements etc. I wouldn't want these to load every time but being able to call them is really useful.
• tjmaynes1 25d ago
  My friends and I created skulto to help us manage and install skills across projects and workstations. https://github.com/asteroid-belt/skulto https://github.com/asteroid-belt/skulto
• ryandsilva 25d ago
  After a brief 'collect-them-all' phase, I scaled back to skills I've hand-selected & created to help me run repeated processes. To keep me organized, here's the directory structure I use. So I don't have to think about it, I've created a skill for my skill folder that files any new skills in this structure as I add / ablate any that aren't useful. - `Discovery/` — Finding docs, searching, information retrieval - `Execution/` — Running processes, CI/CD, releases, deployments - `Planning/` — Goals, specs, tickets, threat models - `Tools/` — Reusable tool integrations (browser, notebooks, CLI creators) - `Debugging/` — Debugging, troubleshooting, fixing - `Expertise/` — (reserved) Domain-specific deep knowledge How skillshare helps: symlinks across agents, syncs to my GH, and for the few skills I've pulled in from other repos, it tracks and handles updates. Every couple of months I review which ones I don't use and remove them.
• maxrev17 25d ago
  I have a custom skills registry which allows dynamic retrieval in any harness, scoped by directory for permission (including global for super useful ones - output pdf for example).
• ResearchBriefs 25d ago
  [flagged]
• dataplumb3r 25d ago
  I blocklist all of them. I allowlist one going over our issue management system, and a few around internal processes I believe have value (basically very short pointers at OpenAPI specs for making HTTP reqs - could probably be in the repo AGENTS.md but w/e). When opening a new repo I'll look if any skills look like they actually give helpful context and aren't Claude vomiting out a torrent of text (over)fitting some insanely specific use case and allowlist those. Or give up after too much exposure to vile AI created text.
  • cindyllm 25d ago
    [dead]
• agcat 25d ago
  Great responses in this thread
• dese 25d ago
  [dead]
• voidmain42 24d ago
  I'm pretty late to this thread, but I battled with the whole "keep them organized" issue across 20+ repositories. I see a lot of folks suggesting scripts and symlinks, but I stopped using that approach because filtering (i.e. figuring out which files belong in each repository) and syncing became a headache. The Agency HQ (https://theagencyhq.dev https://theagencyhq.dev) is another approach that uses a central repository of skills, rules, and other files that are pushed down to developer machines and then placed into project directories as needed. It uses a simple daemon on to pull down the files and distribute them. And it supports filtering and translation for most of the popular agents. Disclaimer, I wrote The Agency and it is in early stages. I'd love feedback if anyone gives it a test drive.
• nixoda8041 24d ago
  [flagged]
• dgunay 24d ago
  For things of global relevance, I keep a git repo in ~/.skills. It has a script that syncs skills across agent harnesses when run. If I think of an interesting skill that seems like it'd be broadly useful, I put it in this repo. If I want to use someone else's skill, I read it with my eyeballs, decide whether I like it, and then copy and paste it into the repo.
  • mstr32 24d ago
    [dead]
• chachachainsaw 24d ago
  I’ve been keeping all skills in .agents/skills and symlinking .claude/skills, this way I can use them across both claude code and codex. One of the not so straight forward things is knowing what frontmatter overlaps, or subtle config differences exist for skills between tools, and making sure to take that into account. I wrote a free tool to constantly diff the agent configs for a handful of tools I use. If interested you can check it out at https://frontmatter.news https://frontmatter.news
• nathwolf 23d ago
  If your problem is keeping skill files organized and easy to maintain with a team, Marktwin might help. It lets you edit and review the Markdown in your GitHub repo together without moving it somewhere else. https://marktwin.com https://marktwin.com. Feedback gives me a good excuse to procrastinate and work on it. Is open source on GitHub.
• crmasterton 23d ago
  github repo with a sync skill (ha!) that copies to the global skills on each computer, and also checks and updates the github repo with any skills that got... well.. updated. at best, skills keep me consistent. at worst, its a prompt repo. I like skills
• mmishra7 22d ago
  [dead]
• mmishra7 22d ago
  I store mine in my prompt/skill drive at https://prompeteer.ai/skills-hub https://prompeteer.ai/skills-hub
• hoistway 21d ago
  Skills files only help when the model can't infer the procedure from the repo. Most of the time a good prompt does the same job.
• Olorin1973 21d ago
  [flagged]