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- Skills are lazy loaded. AGENTS.md is not. It’s stupid regardless.by sharts
- To add to what the other person said, they're also loaded differently than arbitrary docs.
They're presented as a list of titles and descriptions to the LLM and it can pick which ones seem relevant and load them.
Markdown docs the LLM needs to make a tool call to read the files and potentially multiple tool calls to discover data if there's a hierarchy. Additionally, it now has to decide if it should read the entire file or cherry pick parts of it.
Skills organize that in an atomic and composable way.
I think ChatGPT and Claude skills will also package arbitrary artifacts like scripts as well. Not sure if that's standard or not
by nijave - Skills is just lazy loading of well-organized Markdown docs. The "lazy" part is the core part.by bad_username
- Skills represent a pattern many of us converged to before it was named as such (very useful for comms): Progressive disclosure, determistic scripts bundled (not just markdowns). See past comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48132477
Don't underestimate the value of "Skill builder" skills too. Great UX
by alexhans - 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
- Something like instructions in Projects? Or how? Could you please describe the pros and cons of each and when to use each?
That'd be truly helpful!
by moizrocky1 - 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 - This. Skills are exactly that, well structured markdown documents. Its the same with AI agents. You define the structure, what it can and can't do, setup rules and guidelines and then the AI sticks to that exact model. I sell skills on marketplace because sometimes, crafting the perfect prompt can be hard - you want something specific and very particular and don't know how to ask AI to do that. This is where skills come in. You can create your own skills or get them from someone else. They're great.by getstowly