You're probably using Agent Skills wrong

You're probably using Agent Skills wrong(notes.ansonbiggs.com)

20 points by MisterBiggs 5 hours ago | 6 comments

cush 49 minutes ago |

Having agents create their own skills works well if you also give it a layer of verifiability.

Eg. Ask the agent to write a skill then get it to prompt a subagent to use the skill, then iterate until it verifies the task was completed correctly

ben30 27 minutes ago | |

Yes, I wrote a forge skill to do this via a/b testing and third agent to judge the result.

https://github.com/bjcoombs/ai-native-toolkit/blob/main/skil...

It hardens a skill through judge-panel refinement rounds, it’s a quality gate that runs after authoring, not an authoring tool.

whattheheckheck 1 hour ago |

What if I want a way to open up a latent space prompt without having to type it all out everytime?

theowaway213456 4 hours ago |

TL;DR don't have your agent write skills using only its latent knowledge, otherwise you may as well not use a skill in the first place and let it summon that latent knowledge on the fly.

Not sure if this take is correct though. I suspect self-generated skills help the agent avoid having to "decompress" its latent knowledge, which might save tokens? idk, I am not an expert

solarkraft 13 minutes ago | |

It seems so obvious: How would it know better than it already does?

Yet I’ve seen people succeed with „write me a prompt“ prompts. The model makes something up, often it makes sense.

They are like plans in that way: It’s not exactly novel knowledge, but it at least encodes it somewhere to make the process verifiable beforehand and a bit more repeatable.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it improves performance a little, just like thinking blocks do (every model reasons now).

bigcat12345678 4 hours ago | |

I now have rules to not let agent write any docs or processes. Pretty much anything LLM auto-generated are of zero reuse value.