Making OpenCode as lean as Pi agent? Just trimmed... 25k out of OpenCode's system prompt (from 30k to 4-5k tokens) How? Just disable skills and get rid of massive skill definition bloat. Who needs skills anyway? Just kidding, this is the not the way. It makes the agent lame and defeats the point of using one. But it sets a precedent: Find a way to use skills without their definitions pre-loaded into the system prompt every single turn. Another interesting stuff: Upon testing this temporary "no skill setup" with two of hottest OpenCode Zen free models, Mimo V2.5 vs DeepSeek V4 Flash: One thinks more and talks less One thinks less and talks more Check the video to see which is which If you made it here, I'm finding a way to leanest OpenCode setup that I can get I simply don't believe that OpenCode can't be as lean as Pi Upon tinkering, I made a plugin that temporarily extracts the system prompt while I test, and noticed the hundreds of definitions in it from my .agents/skills directory which is shared across all my coding agents (Cursor, Antigravity, Claude, etc.) Of course disabling skills is not the answer, but it just proved that there is a way to strip the system prompt of these massive skill defs Aside from the system prompt hierarchy that injects confusion imo if you have a conflicting and redundant AGENTS.md which I discovered upon digging into OpenCode's source code Apparently it has prompt.ts/system.ts/instruction.ts/llm.ts and loads base .txt prompts based on model family (claude/gpt-o/gpt-5/codex/gemini/others) that all work together to make OpenCode aware of who it was and how it should use tools and become a "coding agent" Gotta find the most minimal mix that fits right into my workflow Make OpenCode as lean as Pi? We'll see. All inshow more

After a few more hours, I think I've figured... out Opus 5. Opus 5 is trained to be more agentic than anything I've used. All Claude 5 models are like that. So what changes? The way to interact with Opus 5 or contextualize it won't work the same way as with other models. It loves exploring, so it doesn't need much guidance for it. Unique preferences, artifacts, and references compliment it well and enable cleaner and more effective exploration and execution. Now that it can explore more effectively on its own and understand intent better, the best thing to do is to get out of its way (e.g., it doesn't need examples of your preferences; a clear high-level description of it works best). It's truly agentic in that sense. A good first step to provide better context for Opus 5 is to distinguish between what's situational and what needs persistence. Regardless, persistent system prompts and CLAUDE.MD needs to stay lightweight. Remove memories and tool descriptions from these. CLAUDE.MD is also a great place to tap into progressive disclosure by linking command/skills to it. On the situational side, agent skills and auto-memory can leverage progressive disclosure and the improved ability of the model to use its external context/knowledge. Conflicting and unnecessary instructions, which are common at this layer (mainly to ensure reliability), are going to throw off this model easily. That's the biggest change I had to make. Simple, clean, and clear prompts and skills work best. I had to clean a lot of my skills and system prompts. The way I prompt remains the same (usually clear and well-scoped). MCP tool descriptions are also more descriptive and have been deduped from the system prompt. Anthropic released a guide on the new rules for context engineering, which was helpful here. I started to test the recommendations and created a little artifact with the things that worked along the way. This might feel like a lot of work. Believe me, it has been frustrating. But I think we can expect future frontier models to become more agentic and smarter at figuring out the right context/gaps. The best thing to do is to prepare for that now. Boris Cherny mentioned that Opus 5 is their least prompt-injectable model yet. I am not sure if that was something they intentionally trained for or if it emerged based on how it was trained, which is to be extremely agentic in nature and more direct in execution.show more

Stop manually making flowcharts. Try this GitHub skill with... Claude Code. I found an open-source tool that turns a plain description of a software system into a clean, interactive diagram. It's called Archify, and it has more than 66,000 stars on GitHub. You add it as a skill to an AI coding agent like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or OpenCode. Then you describe the system in the chat in one line. Archify turns that line into a single HTML file you can open, click through, and send to anyone. If you point your agent at an existing codebase, it reads the code and Archify maps how the pieces connect. I liked five things about it. 1. It makes five kinds of diagrams, including system maps and step-by-step workflows. 2. You can click any piece and trace what connects to it. 3. It checks the layout before it hands the diagram over, so arrows don't pile up and labels don't overlap. 4. It has dark and light themes and exports to PNG, SVG, or a short video. 5. You keep editing in plain chat, with requests like "add Redis" or "highlight the rollback path." You don't need a codebase to use it. A description in the chat is enough.show more

Claude Code can now go find the right skill... itself, instead of you searching for one. it's called find-skills. a small package that plugs into Claude Code, and instead of you hunting for rest, you just describe the task and it searches the whole open skills ecosystem, finds the ones that fit, and installs them for you. > tell it what you're trying to do, in plain english > it scans the skills registry and maps your task to real skills > it pulls the right ones in and sets them up half the time you don't even know a skill exists for what you're doing. now you don't have to.show more

HTML Artifacts are a big part of how I... work with agents now. Artifacts can be more than just static files. When combined with agents, they can take action or help you take action. This unlocks all kinds of interesting ways to work with agents. This is clearly the future. Check out this writing and scheduler artifact I built in a few minutes. It uses a bit of HTML and JS. All the data is in markdown (Obsidian vaults), so the agent can access and modify it at any time. No DB needed. No sophisticated functionalities. The agent decides all that for me based on the skills, context, and memory it has access to. The best part about this simple stack is that all the important information stays with me. This has allowed me to build a recursive self-improving system and automations that can better tap into coding agents like Codex or Claude Code. I could have paid or built an entire app for scheduling posts, and there are so many of them out there. But I don't need to. I've realized a simple artifact does the job. And the simplicity of it is actually an advantage. Very little maintenance for very high returns on personalization, time, and efficiency. The other benefit of this is that I can add features as I please. That level of personalization feels magical, and we should all be pursuing more of it. All of this just keeps compounding. Of course, this example is just about writing. But I have similar artifacts for research, design, experimentation, evaluation, and so much more. And no, I didn't actually publish the post example I shared in the clip. It was just for demonstration purposes. I actually spend more time than this when writing together with agents. Lastly, having built my own agent orchestrator tool has made me realize that simplifying the tool stack is a superpower. If you are curious about how all this works, I will do a live session next week:show more

Excited to introduce Orbit - a new API specifically... built for coding agents to discover, evaluate, and integrate public APIs. Orbit has two simple tools: search and integrate. All your agent needs to do is describe the task, and Orbit will generate a task brief to integrate the API. Best of all: it is completely free! No auth, no set up. Just add it to Claude, Cursor, OpenCode @devindesktop or any other coding agent. Check it out here:show more

new skill: create-canvas. last week I made a skill... to put every component from a repo on one canvas. I started using it with my agent to create variations, compare ideas, and iterate visually without leaving the codebase. so I made a new skill around that workflow. instead of moving your work into another tool, bring the canvas into your codebase and use it to explore UI with your agent, using the real components, styles, and project context already there.show more

Out of sheer frustration ... I decided to vibe... code my own tile map editor to see if it can help with making my agent skills be able to build better levels. It also proves that the agent skill is sufficiently good enough to know how to read the tilemaps - just bad at level design. So maybe I just need to build a level design skill.show more

Claude Code has an incredibly useful command to grade... every skill you're running. Run /skill-doctor with the prompt below. It shows you: 1. Every skill loaded in your session 2. Which ones you've never used 3. How many tokens each one costs you Prompt I run: "run skill-doctor on my current session and grade which skills are actually earning their token cost and which are dead weight."show more

Updated the subagents system in my custom Pi extension... to include: - Pi subagents - Codex subagents - Claude Code subagents The Pi thread can call and spin up any of them, and instead of just using the "codex exec" or whatever, it'll do a tool call that wraps it up in a first class way. Have a decent UI for them already added in as well. Pi being the main thread then having Codex/Claude Code as tools when needed feels so good. A flow I'm already using a ton is: "Implement feature ___, have a cc fable subagent research and plan out the api design + feature, then have a codex subagent implement it, then have a cc fable subagent do a review/fixes focused on simplicity and correctness" I also have a dynamic workflows extension setup and working, but it's not nearly as polished yet. Probably gonna make the subagent system more robust, then built it around that so u could have a workflow that flows between codex/cc/pi...show more

In our Anthropic Claude Design study, 5 designers approved... a design system before they typed their first prompt. >Brand palette >type system >components the whole thing all set up. Only 1 of them named any of it in their opening prompt. That designer was the only one to finish production-ready. The other 4 assumed Claude would carry the system over. It didn't. TLDR: Claude doesn't reliably carry the design system you just approved. If you don't name it in the prompt, it doesn’t exist. It's never been a better time to be a designer, but you must learn the art of the prompt.show more

Building a personal knowledge base for my agents is... increasingly where I spend my time these days. Like Andrej Karpathy, I also use Obsidian for my MD vaults. What's different in my approach is that I curate research papers on a daily basis and have actually tuned a Skill for months to find high-signal, relevant papers. I was reviewing and curating papers manually for some time, but now it's all automated as it has gotten so good at capturing what I consider the best of the best. There are so many papers these days, so this is a big deal. You all get to benefit from that with the papers I feature in my timeline and on DAIR.AI. The papers are indexed using tobi lutke qmd cli tool (all of it in markdown files along with useful metadata). So good for semantic search and surfacing insights, unlike anything out there. I am a visual person, so I then started to experiment with how to leverage this personal knowledge base of research papers inside my new interactive artifact generator (mcp tools inside my agent orchestrator system). The result is what you see in the clip. 100s of papers with all sorts of insights visualized. I keep track of research papers daily, so believe me when I tell you that this system is absolutely insane at surfacing insights. This is the result of months of tinkering on how to index research and leverage agent automations for wikification and robust documentation. But this is just the beginning. The visual artifact (which is interactive too) can be changed dynamically as I please. I can prompt my agent to throw any data at it. I can add different views to the data. Different interactions. I feel like this is the most personalized research system I have ever built and used, and it's not even close. The knowledge that the agents are able to surface from this basic setup is already extremely useful as I experiment with new agentic engineering concepts. I feel like this knowledge layer and the higher-level ones I am working on will allow me to maximize other automation tools like autoresearch. The research is only as good as the research questions. And the research questions are only as good as the insights the agents have access to. Where I am spending time now is on how to make this more actionable. I am obsessed about the search problem here. The automations, autoresearch, ralph research loop (I built one months ago) are easier to build but are only as good as what you feed them. Work in progress. More updates soon. Back to building.show more

Excited to launch a new way to upskill with... AI agents. This is how we are making it possible for anyone to learn to build with coding agents. To start, we are launching 4 new hands-on labs on the following topics: - Agent Skills - Agentic Image Generation - 30 Days of Hermes Agents - Prompt Engineering with Agents I am confident that with our new DAIR.AI platform, anyone can learn to become a top AI builder by building and acquiring highly-demanded AI skills. And there is a lot more landing in the coming weeks.show more

this is the worst local ai will ever be.... it only gets better from here. if you are not expanding your mind with these small models you are missing what's happening right now 99 percent tool call success rate. when steered well with the right skills and a framework like hermes agent the node becomes a cognition layer. not a chatbot. not a toy. an extension of how you think. i was cranking this node at 35 to 50 tok/s all day on personal experiments and now after all the work is done qwen 3.5 9B is iterating on its own code. the game it created. fixing its own bugs autonomously. and the part you should probably not miss is that all of this is happening on a RTX 3060. not an H100. not an A100. the card most of you have sitting in a drawer right now. if you just open that drawer and put that intelligence to work every tensor core on that card should be running for you. your work. your experiments. your thinking. you all have it but because nobody told you what this hardware can actually do in 2026 you never tried. the day it unlocks is the day you test your workload, understand the tradeoffs, debug the loops, and then decide if you need to scale the hardware. there is no point buying 3 mac studios when things done well you can squeeze a similar level of intelligence from 9B compared to 70B. but only when you create the right environment for your model through the right harness. and let me tell you i have tried claude code as a local harness. i have tried opencode. i have tried various others. somehow i landed on hermes agent and never left. there is something magical going on at Nous Research. the tool call parsers, the skills system, the way it handles small models natively. nothing else comes close for local inference. own your cognition. your AI. your agent. your prompts. your experiments. why give them away for free. those are who you are and they don't belong on someone else's servers being monitored. just give it a shot with your existing hardware. you run into a problem the community will help you. and if you are migrating from openclaw to hermes i will personally help you make the switch.show more

New in Orca: search agent sessions by keyword and... resume them instantly ⚡️ Ever lose track of which agent session had that one important change? Not anymore. Search → find the session → jump right back in. Works with Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Pi, etcshow more

i just open sourced the workflow behind $2M AI... video productions... i built 7 skills that run the pipeline end to end, built for Seedance 2.5 and they work in Claude Code, Codex, Hermes or any harness (works best with 1080p using Higgsfield CLI) here's how to use them, in order: /setup writes which image and video models you run into your project, once, so every skill reads the same stack /studio-init scaffolds the whole studio as a file tree from one question, the project name /film-breakdown walks your script scene by scene and writes a 22-field card for every shot /reference-board locks your references into a visual bible, a caption on every image and a ban list for the rest /asset-passport writes the exhaustive descriptor every later prompt will quote word for word /stress-test combat-tests each asset and flips it to locked only at 10 out of 10 repeatability /shot-prompt refuses to run until everything in frame is locked, then writes the 15-block prompt and logs every attempt get access to the skills and full breakdown of the pipeline in the article below:show more

Flipping houses, or rehab and resell, is a game... that seems to be the craze these days. People with little (myself) or tons of money think they can buy a dump of a house, shine it up, and make $100,000 without a problem. So, I gave it a try, putting my proverbial chips in the middle and going all in. Renovated it in 63 days. New roof, HVAC system, electrical panel, kitchen, bathroom, doors, trim, flooring and paint. I listed it, and then it just sat—hours, days, weeks, months — costing me $100 per day in holding costs. We adjusted the price, staged furniture, and reshot photos, but it sat, but why? The basement was wet, which is the kiss of death in real estate, I have learned. As a GC, I have access to a network of subcontractors and skill sets that many people don't, though that doesn't mean repairs are free. After spending $60,000 in renovations, $14,000 in closing costs, and $32,000 in holding costs I was taking a loss on selling this house. Then, I had to put another $15,000 into it to stop water from entering the basement. It is what it is. The house is now under contract, and we feel good about things, which is a distraction from the other house I bought in the middle of all of this until my guy sent me this video yesterday as he was leaving….show more

I built a growing gallery of motion graphics made... with Claude Opus 5.5, each shown next to the prompt or skill that made it. 226 so far, all pulled from posts here and credited to their creators.show more

I made a Claude skill that animates your static... ads. One of the most overlooked ways to boost creative diversity: take your already-validated statics and turn them into video. Built an agent powered by Claude + MakeUGC that makes it a piece of cake: - Start with one of your Meta statics - It analyzes it and generates two video concepts a simple animation, and a more creative one - You approve what you like - It animates them into eye-catching videos with Seedance 3 minutes, start to finish. The most efficient way to hit Meta Advantage+ video requirements. Your only job is taste. Guide it, pick the best options. Giving the whole skill away. Comment "MAKEUGC" and I'll send it to youshow more