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- Hacker News
- A skill is more like a packaging convention around instructions, with the difference that the runtime knows it's a reusable unit. That lets it expose only the skill's name/description initially and load the full instructions (and sometimes bundled scripts or other resources) only when needed. Truth is that if you implemented the same lazy behavior with AGENTS.md and a bunch of Markdown files you'd end up with something that is functionally very close to a skills system.by watchdog408
- It is just marketing speak to evoke some similarity to Sci-fi movies show AI robots learning stuff by quickly going books.
Nothing of the sort happens here though...
So you are not missing anything. What you think is exactly what it is. Just some prefix for preloading the LLM context with..
by qsera - Aren't "skills" just some words and syntax that tokenize in a fashion that gets an instance of an LLM primed for (you hope) the right thing statistically?
After that, I think "skill" is just a good name. It sounds more "AI" than a "spell" or "incantation", which would sound magical and esoteric.
by bediger4000 - If you add all those .md files to your AGENTS.md, your harness will likely load all those files into context. This will create context pollution for you.
Context, similar to your computer's memory, is limited.
Additionally, the more things the AI has in context, the worse it performs.
Skills helps you to quickly add more context for doing things, without polluting your context window.
I think you need to learn about AI, there isn't anything hype there. It's just an easier way of giving more context to the AI.
This can be helpful, for example, if you have an internal API that does XYZ, and you want the AI to know that API, you can save that API, its endpoints and authenticaiton methods to a skill, and invoke it when you want your harness (CC, Codex) to know about the existance of that API, to make requests, make tests etc.
by thiago_fm - Skill is a document that AI agent ignores, distorts and forgets immediately after reading it :)
- From the research, it does seem like skills increase performance though it varies quite a lot by domain and whether they were written by ai or humans https://www.skillsbench.ai
But whether they would do better than just markdown on its own isn't really settled. Would be interesting to see a comparison of same tasks, same agent, same context budget, skill vs the same content pasted into AGENTS.md.
by ritsukai - > Why do frameworks like Claude Code or Codex have the concept of “skills” instead of just using well-organized Markdown docs?
"Well-organized markdown docs" are exactly what skills are.
More specifically, they are well-organized markdown docs that explain how to do some particular thing.
by infotainment