[electric_muse]

> But skills are not fundamentally different from *.instruction.md prompt in Copilot or AGENT.md and its variations.

One of the best patterns I’ve see is having an /ai-notes folder with files like ‘adding-integration-tests.md’ that contain specialized knowledge suitable for specific tasks. These “skills” can then be inserted/linked into prompts where I think they are relevant.

But these skills can’t be static. For best results, I observe what knowledge would make the AI better at the skill the next time. Sometimes I ask the AI to propose new learnings to add to the relevant skill files, and I adopt the sensical ones while managing length carefully.

Skills are a great concept for specialized knowledge, but they really aren’t a groundbreaking idea. It’s just context engineering.

[tedivm]

Back in my day we referred to this as "documentation". It turns out it's actually useful for developers too, not just agents.

[abirch]

Wait developers RTFM?

[CuriouslyC]

Pro tip, just add links in code comments/readmes with relevant "skills" for the code in question. It works for both humans and agents.

[_pdp_]

This is exactly what I do. It works super well. Who would have thought that documenting your code helps both other developers and AI agent? I've been sarcastic.

[scottlamb]

This might be one of the best things about the current AI boom. The agents give quick, frequent, cheap feedback on how effective the comments, code structure, and documentation are to helping a "new" junior engineer get started.

I like to think I'm above average in terms of having design docs alongside my code, having meaningful comments, etc. But playing with agents recently has pointed out several ways I could be doing better.

[pbronez]

I’ve seen some dev agents do this pretty well.