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dannyobrien01/16/20261 replyview on HN

I'm happy to bet with that skills -- or "a set of instructions in markdown that get sucked into your context under certain conditions" will stick around. Similarly, I think that the Claude Code/Cowork -- or "interactive prompt using shell commands on a local filesystem" -- will also stick around.

I fully anticipate there being a fair amount of thrashing on what exactly the right wrapper is around both of those concepts. I think the hard thing is to discriminate between the learned constants (vim/emacs) are from the attempts to re-jiggle or extend that (plugins, etc); it's actually useful to get reviews of these experiments exactly so you don't have to install all of them to find out whether they add anything.

(On skills, I think that the reason why there "aren't good examples out there" is because most people just have a stack of impromptu local setups. It takes a bit of work to extract those to throw them out into the public, and right now it's difficult to see that kind of activity over lots of very-excitable hyping, as you rightly describe.

The deal with skills and other piles of markdown is that they don't look, even from a short distance, like you can construct a business model for them, so I think they may well end up in the world of genuine open source sharing, which is a much smaller, but saner, place.


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throwup23801/16/2026

> (On skills, I think that the reason why there "aren't good examples out there" is because most people just have a stack of impromptu local setups. It takes a bit of work to extract those to throw them out into the public, and right now it's difficult to see that kind of activity over lots of very-excitable hyping, as you rightly describe.

Very much this. All of my skills/subagents are highly tailored to my codebases and workflows, usually by asking Claude Code to write them and resuming the conversation any time I see some behavior I don't like. All the skills I've seen on Github are way too generic to be of any use.

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