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preordainedyesterday at 10:06 PM8 repliesview on HN

I can't be the only one to think it is silly to interact with tools in this way. Honestly, I see skills, "hooks", and other monkey-patch efforts as things that will be short-lived investments, weird kludges from an era where you had to "hand-crank" your AI, more often. Something to go the same way as using HTML tables as bastardized CSS


Replies

cadamsdotcomtoday at 12:37 AM

Because a deterministic shell around the model gives the best of both worlds. It’s able to achieve its goals but you define what “done” looks like and deterministically enforce checking of that in a way the model can’t cheat its way out of or forget to check on.

0gsyesterday at 11:19 PM

counterpoint: i am pretty sure i can do everything i want text-wise for the rest of my life with just the skills i make and a reliable harness.

agree the prompting style in OP is a little over the top tho lol

sh4rksyesterday at 10:37 PM

Coding agents are unusable without skills and mcp tools

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ryanackleyyesterday at 11:18 PM

I might not be smart enough to grasp what you're saying because it sounds a little ridiculous to me.

Do you mean the AI will "figure out" how to just do the things we use skills and hooks for today? Do you understand the difference between deterministic and probabilistic behavior and why the difference matters a lot when doing technical tasks?

mattmanseryesterday at 10:15 PM

ULTRATHINK stop.

Rain dance go!

taytusyesterday at 10:13 PM

Yes an no. Some skills are very very tuned to our own workflows. The model providers may come up with some similar alternatives but not always. Also, sometimes you need a solution now and not in three months.

unnouinceputyesterday at 10:44 PM

"....using HTML tables as bastardized CSS"

Bro, the gazzilion DIV inside DIV spilled nonsense by all these modern frameworks is driving me crazy. TABLE as bastardized CSS is instant rendering. But hey, you're young, I get it.

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SpicyLemonZestyesterday at 11:47 PM

It's silly until you realize how similar they are to the weird kludges we apply when we need to get deterministic behavior out of humans. Airline pilots have a number of "skill files" (although they call them checklists) which they open and use on an as-needed basis, and are trained to respect a number of "hook" conditions when specific actions must be immediately performed.