logoalt Hacker News

turlockmiketoday at 12:13 AM2 repliesview on HN

The best way to prompt an LLM is to describe the outcome you want, that's it. They are trained as task completers. A clear outcome is way better than a process.

If the LLM fails, either you didn't describe your outcome sufficiently or is misinterpreted what you said or it couldn't do it (rare).

Common errors should be encoded as context for future similar tasks, don't bloat skills with stuff that isn't shown to be necessary.


Replies

peabtoday at 12:47 AM

a skill is just reusuable/shareable context. It's just text, really. It's useful for things like documentation on how to use an API (this works better than MCP in my opinion), or a non consensus way of doing something. For example, you can use remotion to generate video. There are useful remotion skills that allow you to reliably generate specific types of videos. Captions of a certain style, for example.

alexjurkiewicztoday at 12:43 AM

I agree that many skills are overblown and unnecessary. But there's a lot of value in giving AI the right process. See how much more effective Claude can be for moderate or large changes when using the superpowers skill.