Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
I'm looking for a better way to manage skills files—how to find them, keep them organized, and ensure they actually work. I'm also wondering how to keep improving them over time. I believe that general-use skills will eventually be subsumed by model capabilities, but until then, I'm seeking efficient management strategies.
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.
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.
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.
- avaer
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.
- alexhans
- 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...
- FailMore
Surprised it has not been mentioned, but I think relying on 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.
- srijanshukla18
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.
- WatchDog
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.
- jve
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
- maxim-fin
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
- shermantanktop
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.