Posted by imadtaieber 1 day ago
Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
I believe skills will eventually be eating by model capabilities, but until then I'm just looking for a better way to manage things.
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.
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.