The only skill I find invaluable is taste-skill I describe my product idea and have it by generate 3 sample renders using $imagegen-frontend-web Then have it use my favorite render of the options to build with $image-to-code

I didn’t either until I decided to abstract all my business metrics as an api and told a skill how to do it Now I say “use Chrome to audit my Google Ads account, then figure out based on my company metrics using $companyskill if I’m optimized or if any changes need to be made, compare it to seasonality data” Allows it to find recent COGS data, performance, etc and revise ads/road targets etc Also do this by having it browse my Google Analytics accounts and find emerging keywords to implement in my website copy and/or launch SEO pages based on the intelligence it finds, but that’s not a skill Anyway like you I don’t really use skills until I built this one

Skills are just for when you want to bottle/save some way of doing something

Same, but these are useful. RTK -> appends to each command and get rid of the unnecessary things from it automatically -> less token usage Caveman -> removes unnecessary blablabla from to output -> straight to the point Superpowers -> for complex features it is sometimes better in the planning phase

Skills are for people who are too inexperienced / stupid to tell their AI what to do. They revel in being able to “install a skill” to use a well-documented API / SDK that they wouldn’t even know exists. If you need to use a skill, that’s a skill issue (99% of the time).

I use skills for repeatable tasks, once an agent does something well i distill it into a skill and I have several per project for repetitive tasks, most of them aren't about coding or code review, but about agents using an API in a specific way or for browser / computer use

skills are useful for workflows and progressive disclosure of knowledge model wasn't trained on, e.g. "make-hyperframes-video-in-my-brand-style". but most skills like "marketer" or "growth-hacker" are beyound useless, they're harmful.

I love skills! Most skills are just elaborate system prompts and a way to make & share custom LLm memory Also way better than 99% of MCPs, just point it at an api and tell it to make a skill and now you have your own custom MCP Helpful because I don’t want to type the same long commands over and over Also nice because you can make it automatic, kinda like training your ai to do something again later Becoming popular in big companies since you can have many people making skills and sharing them, now your agent can do things you didn’t even know existed

Try create a few for things you notice yourself repeatedly doing They are like prompts Claude will automatically invoke when contextually relevant Them being “just text files” is what makes it such an elegant system

I'd been feeling imposter syndrome about this for a while. Hearing all of these people go on and on about their crazy ass skill setups with no apparent improvement in productivity

You will get better result with a well written skill and don’t have to repeat all the time. At least if it’s up to date.

Skill issue :)

They’re ways of packaging instructions so you don’t need to go into detail every time We eval our skills and get genuinely better results with them, but most skills out there are just vibe coded slop without data backing it

I have like a stash of prompts that I use repeatedly I guess people refer to those as skills

they're excellent and very useful

skills are only useful for teamwork to streamline everyone's output

No different than using packages, which you probably do If someone else has already written something, no need to rewrite it yourself

Thought the same, but some are good.

Skills aren't only text, the can include scripts that can be run, too

ive been analysing what they do a lot, often it looks up skills automatically and yea i should turn it off because its a verbose waste of tokens eg in this example when it looks up how to use git when it knows already how to use git its in the weights....

Think it is like a script. Use it for repeated tasks

I’ve found it to be helpful when getting the agent to help with a tool (clerk cli). But it’s really just a substitute for looking up docs. Skills are very useful for agents completing business tasks though cause those processes change for every company

Skills sit higher in the prompt stack. That’s the only reason to use them vs playbook / SOP workspace files

same

Never download a skill, but when you find yourself doing something over and over with an agent, in different projects, the agent sometimes skips memory or fixed instructions, so a skill ensures it gors through the right process I have one for insrance to search for info, it goes through the exact process i want to search X, the web, etc

Write specs > Let AI create build-plan.md > One step in the plan is one prompt > Follow steps > When done, tweak, refactor, and redesign.

yep

Skills are documentation, indeed. They are also a prepackaged prompt to refresh your context on demand with specific instructions and knowledge around processes. The only thing I want around d skills is the ability to eject them from the context once they are used.

They are useful in brownfield apps with a bunch of ppl working on things I think