alt Hacker NewsThis is confusing.
TFA says they added an index to Agents.md that told the agent where to find all documentation and that was a big improvement.
The part I don't understand is that this is exactly how I thought skills work. The short descriptions are given to the model up-front and then it can request the full documentation as it wants. With skills this is called "Progressive disclosure".
Maybe they used more effective short descriptions in the AGENTS.md than they did in their skills?
Replies
I also thought this is how skills work, but in practice I experienced similar issues. The agents I'm using (Gemini CLI, Opencode, Claude) all seem to have trouble activating skills on their own unless explicitly prompted. Yeah, probably this will be fixed over the next couple of generations but right now dumping the documentation index right into the agent prompt or AGENTS.md works much better for me. Maybe it's similar to structured output or tool calls which also only started working well after providers specifically trained their models for them.
The reported tables also don't match the screenshots. And their baselines and tests are too close to tell (judging by the screenshots not tables). 29/33 baseline, 31/33 skills, 32/33 skills + use skill prompt, 33/33 agent.md