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

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

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

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

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 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

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

OpenCode Go is now wired into Codex!! The pricing... is insane. $10 gets you 10,000 DeepSeek requests every 5 hours (no weekly limits). I converted that into DeepSeek API dollars because I thought I was reading it wrong, and the same 5 hours of usage would run somewhere between $10 and $30 depending on how big your context gets. So one afternoon of use already covers the whole sub. It comes with Kimi K3 as well. Both sit in the picker next to my other models now. Next time we hit a limit in the middle of a loop, we can grab it and keep going.show more

New feature in Claude Code 2.1.14 just dropped! You... can now search and install plugins from the marketplaces installed in your current Claude Code session. This is huge if you’re building plugins on top of Claude Code’s marketplace layer (Skills, Agents, Hooks, etc). How it works: - Run /plugin - The official Claude marketplace is installed by default - Use the search bar to find the plugin you want - Select one or multiple plugins with space, then press i to install - Go to the Installed tab to browse and enable them With the exponential growth of Skills and Agent-based components running in the CLI, improving plugin discoverability is a big win. Pretty sure more marketplace-related features are comingshow more

There’s two kinds of traders. The one that is... able to walk away and the one that revenge trades. Overtrading kills more accounts than anything else. I used to be this way, getting angry that price wasn’t going my way and pushing the button again and again until I blew up all my accounts. It takes a lot of inner work, but believe me it’s worth it to work on not just your strategy and executions, but your mental game as well. Being able to walk away from the screen before it’s too late is a real skill set to work on. Don’t be the guy that revenge trades. Strategies that worked for me: 1. Writing down my game plan at the start of the morning. As long as I followed my plan, it’s a win. 2. Having pictures of family on my trading desk. Trading for others and not just yourself is important, it keeps you grounded. 3. Having alarms go off on my phone at the end of the session to bring me back to reality and remind me to walk away.show more

MOST PEOPLE WHO BUILD WEBSITES USE CLAUDE CODE THE... WRONG WAY A few people train it properly and get the bottom one. The difference is not the model. It is the skills you feed it. Regular Claude without web-design systems produces clean but average product pages. The same Claude, loaded with the right skills, starts delivering sites that look like they cost $5,000. Those skills are free right now. They live on GitHub. The exact names sit in the article below. One set of prompts. One trained workflow. Suddenly every luxury brand page you build stops looking like a template and starts looking like money.show more

I learned this the hard way: do NOT use... SwiftUI if you want your app to look and feel amazing. At least when coding with AI. (sorry, Apple colleagues reading this 😅) I'm sharing my process vibe coding this calorie tracker. I get a lot of questions about the fluid transition in the video. Here's the whole story. Initially, Claude built the grid with SwiftUI. It was quick and easy, and looked good! But the transition to the day view was a boring navigation push/pop. No fun. I wanted something custom. I asked Claude to make it a fluid transition that remaps the food tiles from their source to destination positions. All hell broke loose. Claude tried a bunch of horrible things. Initially it used matched geometry effects, which worked OK but didn't lend themselves well to gesture-driven animations. So it resorted to SwiftUI preference keys + geometry readers to figure out the source and destination positions and calculate the interpolated position based on gesture progress, coordinating across grid and day views. But this meant it had to write a custom layout because it couldn't reposition tiles inside the native SwiftUI grid. And it had to do an awkward handoff between views, which always created ugly pops or jumps. And don't get me started on trying to put it on a bouncy spring, that only made the math 10x buggier. Fortunately, Claude Fable was smart enough to see that this was becoming a disaster (and discover most of the issues itself, in the simulator), so it pivoted away from SwiftUI. Opus might not be so wise, so you'll have to pay attention and intervene. Ultimately, it rewrote it in plain UIKit and everything turned out great. After that, we moved from 2D images to 3D assets, which introduced a new set of performance challenges and yet another rewrite to a single Metal layer, which is what you see below. I can write more about the 2D-to-3D saga if anyone's interested. If I were to do it again, I'd just say "Don't use SwiftUI" from the very first prompt, and save a few hours of headaches. SwiftUI can be amazing for a human iterating directly in code. But agents don't benefit from any of its advantages. Plus, agents have seen decades of UIKit training data, so they're great at writing it, and it's far more flexible. Here's hoping we see more agent-friendly iterations of SwiftUI in the future. Till then, I'm probably going to avoid it.show more

Learning is something you and your baby do together.... You can think of the process as happening in three distinct stages, during which skills are transferred gradually from you to your little one: During the first stage, your baby is observing the behavior and skills of others. During the second, they begin to emulate these behaviors - and can find success with the support of a helpful adult (you) or more expert peer (often a sibling). And gradually they internalize these skills and perform them all by themselves. This video is a great example of the shared second phase. Infants explore the world with their mouths. But an important lesson of toddlerhood is that some things are for putting in our mouths, while others are not. This little one knows that we don’t eat the Play-Doh. But it sure is tempting! Watch as he breaks off a piece and brings it to his mouth. As he does his eyes lift and he realizes that Mom is watching - which alone prompts some introspection. He grins broadly, shakes his head and exclaims “No, no, no” - using Mom’s past words to affirm his decision to place the Play-Doh back on the table. Left to his own devices, who knows? But together, without exchanging a word, he managed to make the right choice. As a parent it’s important to remember the key role you play in the learning process. And that extends to your child’s behavior. Self-regulation begins as co-regulation. So be there. This sweet little guy was shared to IG by parentosa.show more

LLM Artifacts Connected to Andrej Karpathy's LLM Knowledge base... idea, I've been building out a fun way to generate dynamic artifacts from these knowledge bases with the goal of discovering and revealing meaningful and deeper insights. LLM KBs are hard to consume for humans, as I think they are more built for agents. So the question is, what form would be useful for humans to take actions and make important decisions? That's what I am trying to figure out with these artifacts. The artifact example shows a pulse on HN discussions around AI-related stories. The insights can go deeper, of course, but this is already super fun and thought-provoking, like some of my favorite podcasts. The format and depth matter a lot. The aggregation skills of agents are outstanding if you tune the prompts and skill carefully. I built this artifact generator in a few minutes through an agent skill, but I feel like there are so many ways that LLM-generated information can be used and consumed. Like generating deeper insights and analysis, and things that are just not feasible for humans today. The generated artifact (including its data and design) serves as reusable templates or can be updated in real-time via auomations, which is something I am also working on. It is truly an insane way to monitor and track information. Better than a newsletter. Better than newspapers. There is something about this that gets me really excited about the future of AI agents for knowledge generation and discovery. Lots of hidden gems everywhere just waiting to be discovered and acted on if the information is presented correctly. This is not perfect. The format, style/prose can be improved, but this is easy to customize via skill. You can personalize it to your liking. I feel like these dynamic artifacts are going to emerge as a strong new medium to stay on the cutting edge of things, both for agents and humans. My target is research, of course. This was just a basic example. Besides animation, I am also targeting other components like voice, videos, images, slides, etc. This space is full of opportunities to explore. Skill for this coming soon.show more

ANTHROPIC JUST TURNED AI AGENTS INTO GIT REPOS Anthropic... shipped "ant" - a CLI that runs every Claude API endpoint straight from your terminal. The headline isn't the terminal access. It's that you can now version-control an AI agent as YAML in Git and have CI sync it to the Claude Platform, the same way you ship code. - Every API resource is a subcommand: messages, models, files, agents, sessions - Define an agent in a YAML file, check it into your repo, and keep it in sync with one update command - Spin up a session, send it an event, then pull every event and tool call back from the same CLI - Claude Code knows how to drive ant out of the box - it shells out and reads the results with no glue code Agents just stopped being prompts you babysit and became infrastructure you deploy.show more

NEW HTML VIDEO SKILL: Claude can now make photo-grid... promo video ads like these. These are very popular offer-style ads that work well for bottom-of-funnel conversions. Brands will often run these when they're doing seasonal sales, for example. It's pure HTML, so it's very cheap to make because there's no video generation cost. You can create dozens of variants very fast and then test them in Meta. All you have to do is install the skills and give Claude your brand website. This skill is insane - it'll make the entire Ad and give you a link where you can download the mp4 file. > If you want more variants, just mention in the prompt > If you have a specific concept in mind, just mention in the prompt > If you want any edits on the generated ad, just mention in the prompt Comment Goose and I'll DM you the skill (must be following so I can DM you)show more