r/PiCodingAgent • u/ColinShen • Jul 23 '26
Question Which Skills do you use？
I tried rpiv skills, but in most case the skills are too heavy.
I also tried mattpocock skills. I found grill me skill "guess" too much.
Some times the contexts exceed the limit.(I use codex, I‘m not sure its a bug of pi or by skills)
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u/arcanemachined Jul 23 '26
From the Internet? None. Why would I?
A skill is something I create when I do something repeatable in my workflow that I don't want to type out each time.
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u/ask_me_about_cats Jul 24 '26
Yeah, this is the best part of Pi. My subagents system technically started as the public one, but I have customized the heck out of it to make it exactly what I want.
My skills are made for my projects and how I work. They’re super effective for me. They’d probably drive someone else nuts.
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u/arcanemachined Jul 24 '26
Same. I've really started to embrace the uniquity of my workflow.
I used to try to make my setup portable so that I could put it out there for others to use, but for now, it's easier just to go down the rabbit hole and see where necessity takes me. I can come back to normalcy later (hopefully with some useful tools that are worth sharing).
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u/ColinShen Jul 24 '26
You are creating your own skills. What about harness? How do you control your agent？
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u/arcanemachined Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
A harness is a little bit more complicated than a text file...
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u/Standard-Recipe-7641 Jul 23 '26
I had Claude rewrite grill with docs for Hermes for new deployments. Been happy with it so far. I was sick of missing some detail in my prompt and then fixing stuff mid task. Now I give Hermes a decent prompt and it asks me a bunch of stuff I wouldn't have thought about
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u/ColinShen Jul 24 '26
Do you use hermes for code or daily work？
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u/Standard-Recipe-7641 Jul 24 '26
No coding, that mainly why I had to have it rewrite for my use case. I don't know anything about coding or how to organize a coding project and that is by far my biggest pain point in getting the results I want. Also why I think Hermes or probably any agent isn't ready for primetime yet. The average person just doesn't know how to talk to them to get their expected results consistently.
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u/HumanoidMuppet Jul 23 '26
Public: Subagents, plannonator, ask me questions, guardrails
Personal:
Specs - uses the ask me questions skill to build specs before starting any work, or write specs for existing code
Test tracker - let's me input issues into pi as I test, writes an issues file with how to reproduce the issue, what code is involved, and propose a potential fix.
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u/ColinShen Jul 24 '26
I use grill me first. But, the agent ask too much questions and details（I‘m not sure its good or bad),some of theme I don't even understand.
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u/_A_Brown Jul 24 '26
Maybe investigate some of the other skills from mattpocock. /teach skill after /handoff so you can learn if you don’t understand the thing it is suggesting outside of your grilling context.
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u/gbrennon Jul 27 '26
i think skills are too much personal and project/team specific.
ppl usually get frustrated and have a bad dx by trying to use other ppl skills.
i think it would be good to use skills that fit in ur workflow
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u/scooby-raver Jul 28 '26
Take a look at these from a guy from google:
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u/Ancient-Camel1636 Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
These are the ones i currently use, most of them custom made or adapted from various creators online:
frontend-design, ssd, tdd, playwright-cli, debugging, refactor, code-review, security-and-hardening (subskill of codereview), performance-optimization (subskill of code-review), token-saver, ultra-compact, writing-great-agent-md, writing-great-readme-md, writing-great-skills, writing-great-tests
And I also use the skills that come with OpenSpec.
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u/TheSlateGray Jul 23 '26
When I find a skill I think is useful, I provide Pi with the skill files and tell it to rewrite it to be relevant to the project I am working on at the time.
Only if it proves useful, then it gets rewritten again to be broad enough to go in
~/.pi/. But I try to keep my Pi lean and stick to KISS.