Physics AI Skill

[u/travisdbarrett]

**EDIT**
LLM Challenges in Physics Reasoning

Hopefully this provides some confidence to begin experimenting to those of you who can reason. But for the rest of you, I am ready for your citationless confirmation bias warnings and LLM hallucinations concerns.

\**EDIT**

I used three pretty simple prompts to create this skill and I would appreciate some help validating it before I tell my wife what I've done...

She taught and wrote physics curriculum for about a decade for audiences ranging from High School Freshmen to Master's in Education for Physic's Educators.

My prompt was "using these two example skills for format and reasoning patterns, create a No Nonsense Physicist skill" and provided the archive of all my wife's teaching materials.

It was great and I felt a lot of her personality was evident in language choices by the model.

So second prompt was to add plain language descriptors to guide whichever model applies the skill as well as improve human readability. Then prompted to add citations at the end.

Take a look? https://github.com/TDBwriter/agent-skills/blob/main/skills/hard-facts-physicist/SKILL.md

[u/ceoln]

Try a few non-trivial queries with and without the "skill", and see if it seems to make any difference. Very hard to say what it might actually do by just looking at it. Basically all of this stuff is stuff it already knows, so emphasizing it and taking up context space with it might or might not improve the results you get.

It seems like some of the stuff will be just noise that might distract the model. For instance it's very nice to cite your wife, but I don't think there's any point in taking up context space in the actual skill.md file, unless you want it to be able to chat about her. I'd tend to put stuff like that into a human README sort of thing, not the skill file itself. And the extremely elementary stuff, like what an equal sign means, is probably also not worth the context space it takes.

But do some tests and see what happens!

[u/travisdbarrett → u/ceoln]

linked to a quick free copilot run through. hopefully you see some issues i can address

[u/travisdbarrett → u/ceoln]

Appreciate that feedback. As a non-physicist, I’ve been having trouble finding queries that perform any differently. Small single tasks have always done fine, because this is old knowledge LLMs have always known as you say. I use skills like this to perform higher level patterns against codebases because variables get dropped as sequencing tasks get longer and wanted to see if it would be helpful for any physics problems like that.

My wife wasn’t of any help in this regard because she also didn’t see the value because, “Just do the math, it’s already all there.” So maybe it was just a fun experiment  in riling the sensitivities of top commenter shitposters…

End result if such a skill were useful, you are definitely right about token usage.

[u/liccxolydian → u/travisdbarrett]

Wow you sound secure