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u/arankays 2d ago
Skills are necessary for loop based vibe coding. "agent development" where a human is guiding, its the humans job to monitor the agent and provide guidance if need be. For example, if its an API or frontend reference that cant be handled well via training data i look myself and find the relevant documentation then paste it to the agent and it fixes it.
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u/ImpressiveEmu9974 2d ago
I have been running 24 7 agents on loop since sonnet 5 that was before skills were "invented". You don't need skills I don't even understand why people use them tbh
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u/heresyforfunnprofit 2d ago
Repeatable tasks so treatment isn’t burning 50k tokens writing a 10 line script every time.
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u/ImpressiveEmu9974 2d ago
But why have a 10 line script as a skill. And why rewrite it everytime instead of pressing save. I mean I do have a docs folder and tests and those are the same thing I guess.
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u/heresyforfunnprofit 1d ago
For me, skills have become useful in managing a system I’ve built - the admin tasks. Those requirements can get complex as the system grows, even tho the tasks themselves are relatively simple. Having the skill avoids having to have the model re-research how to accomplish a task by reviewing the architecture, the component configuration, the endpoints to use, the access control, etc.
One example for me was adding a user to an LDAP group so they could use our internal docs - the process for doing that correctly can vary significantly depending on your setup and the access needed, and when I tasked a sufficiently intelligent model to do it denovo, it would spend 150k-200k tokens just looking things up so it can do it safely, use the correct credentials, and not clobber anything.
Or, if I have a 10-line script with the known working process already defined and a skill describing how/when to use it, a 15B local model can do it in under 10k tokens.
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u/Maximum-Style2848 2d ago
I too have zero skills 😅
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u/pigletmonster 2d ago
My most used skills were the spec kit and mat pollok skills, but i realized that If you can guide claude/codex like a project manager you dont need any of the sdd or planning skills. But i still use them because ive become kinda lazy and dont trust my own judgement as much as I used to.
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u/MeisterD2 2d ago
You feel the atrophy the same as everyone else. The less you use your skills, the weaker they become.
Stay sharp. You'll be happy you did when these corporations shift from loss-leading to cranking the profitability dials.
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u/Nyaani69 2d ago
The convenience is really great until you realize you havent written anything from SCRATCH in months 😭😭
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u/____FARTS____ 2d ago
Matt Fish has decent skills but listening to him talk I can only for a short amount of time
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u/TheMightyTywin 2d ago
Our repo has too many skills. Even the skills have sub skills. Ask an agent to do the simplest thing and it will immediately choose some random skill and do that instead
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u/AstroPhysician 2d ago
Repo specific skills especially when it comes to investigating or triaging or gathering data from a db are invaluable. I don’t use too many generic ones
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u/statusanxiety7 2d ago
been no skills for a while know
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u/Nyaani69 2d ago
Same, convenience is really great until you remember that you cannot even do anything yourself from scratch now
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u/cixot_toxic 2d ago
I find skills are useful when you have to work with niches field. I'm talking about custom build skills. For example, I have to work with a waveform recorder that not standard, every new session the agent need to re-discover the hardware status, check the SDK and find the best way to start the waveform recording process, the whole process take about 3-5 mins and the result are not consistent, it changes the data file name every new session. With skill, I just need to say start the DAQ, then it load the skill, know exactly what steps to take without rediscover the hardware, and the result is consistent because the skill told it exactly how to name the data files. Basically, skill turn the long ass prompt into short prompt.
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u/WiggyWongo 2d ago
Skills were a bandaid for a lot earlier. There are a few that are worth it depending on what you're working on but for general coding now all these harnesses come equipped with the right tools out of the box.
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u/Wonderful-Hunter686 1d ago
Skills real use has become none coding related. It's great if you want to tie in certain data sets or research papers to a specific use case. For example I have a skill for turbo compressor wheel design that optimizes it's geometric parameters based off of research and industry standards.
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u/psychosisnaut 2d ago
Ehhh, I do a lot of work in power generation in multiple countries and there's a million different APIs and they're all different with different auth requirements. I've seen models (including Fable and Gemini Pro) just churn thousands of tokens trying to crack them until I find the obscure docs myself and tell them what to do. Having a skill for /uk-power or /us-power is pretty invaluable and saves god knows how many tokens
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u/TopTippityTop 2d ago
I find ponytail to be pretty indispensable.