alt Hacker NewsGlad to see that more and more people realize these are just snake oils. Without objective metrics like benchmarks, none of the claims mean anything.
That's also how I feel about skills/plugins. While some provide important context for specific projects/environments, I am very skeptical about (over)generalized skills like "writing JS tests" or "creating a spec". There are dozens of these skills internally at my company, but I haven't seen a single benchmark that shows any of those are better than just plain, single sentence prompts in a meaningful way (aka statistically significant).
I see the same thing and have effectively the same philosophy. If I'm using something like figma or glean or playwright/chrome dev tools, plugin/skill/mcp - likely very useful.
But so many of the weird collections of skills that people on YouTube get viral followings for - I just don't get it.
People excitedly ask me what skills I use and I feel bad just saying only things we've directly authored for some express purpose. None of the "hot" ones.
I've written a large handful of skills, but they aren't like vim plugins. I don't just leave them "on".
This has been my experience at least- curious if I'm just behind the times.
I also effectively didn't leave the IDE+ChatGPT copy/paste workflow until the first release of Claude code. So maybe I'm slow to adopt.