Don't find them. Ask the AI to do something. When it does it correctly, ask it to make a skill for it. Clear the session, try to use the skill, fix any problems found, modify your repo and harness if necessary. Repeat until skill works 0-shot. Improve with the same process.

This largely works with a specific model, specific harness, specific prompt, specific context. You may need to modify your agent harness to manage skills depending on runtime parameters. Pi is a great general purpose agent for the these modifications.

If you do find other skills and want to use them, put them through the loop above. But keep in mind that since they were created in their own circumstances, they may not work in yours.

Also separate rules from skills. Rules tell AI when to do things, skills tell AI how to do things. Tool call/MCP limitations, agent configurations, and harness extensions, can help it stay on track.

Not really related but I wonder how people benchmark the effectiveness of skills/agents?

I'm seeing the agent working quite fine with just direct prompting and the agent doing things by itself rather than using skills. Is it better for certain task size?

I wrote a small command-line tool that installs skill packs into agent-specific project folders. It works pretty much like `brew` (or any package manager, really). The skills are compiled into the binary so that I don't have to worry about where they're located and can quickly move the skills between machines by copying the tool.

Making sure they actually work? Trial and error, mostly. I know some folks have tried auto-researcher approaches, but I haven't found that to be the best use of time in my work.

It’s all nonsense. Just ask it for what you want with natural language. Why would you want to reintroduce all the random magic incantations we’ve had in tech for decades.

With a custom skills workspace in mininote

https://mininote.ink/docs/mcp-docs

Agent can use mcp to update its own skills, or I can copy template skills into local dorectories via the api. Very useful, like notion on steroids but is completely free.

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

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how did stupid markdown file become a thing, this industry really went to shit.

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