The Markdown thing is getting out of hand

I agree and disagree. There's value in a consistent way to address certain problems or processes. Enough prompting can reach the same places, but a skill saves time. Skills are context shortcuts, nothing more. When you want agents to handle more of the loop (removing yourself as much as possible and not being a roadblock) they need ways to know what to do next. That doesn't mean you disappear; you just let them work longer before you re-enter. Example: I build a feature in a large app. Our CI runs 30k tests I can't run locally. After coding, I don't stop; I push, wait for results, and fix what I (or my agent) missed. It's a loop of fixing, running locally, pushing, and checking again. I don't want to prompt this each time. A /push-and-fix-ci skill tells the agent how to push, wait for tests, get failures, and push again, plus which type of problems are okay to fix and when to stop and call me. You end up creating skills for daily workflow. I treat them as living things and tweak them when things go wrong. And what helps me also helps the other 100 devs on the same codebase.

Let's instead give credit to people when they actually develop something and can maintain it properly :D anyone can generate slop md files! lol

CHAD

That's a bit of nonsense from the stripper. Skills is the only way you turn a general model into a specialized model for your task, your codebase, your workflow. Yes, models can do that all, but you need to ask them.

I really like how hermes does skills, it just creates skills on the go when it finds anything useful, and just removes them if they are not used for more than 30 days. That is just to show how sacred people make skills to be which it is not.

at this point human engineers are handicapping AI (SI ) with their markdown skill restrictions 😂.

bookmarking to find if later, not because I need it specifically but to come back to that tweet if I might want to, for whatever reason. So in simple words, to save that tweet as there are no other option beside likes, to do that. So I bookmarked this not because of the md's but I might want to come back later on and watch the rage bait again :)

Skills to me are a way to take repetitive tasks and pre-inform the agent on how to do them. I get tired of saying the same thing over and over on new sessions I just make a skill, invoke that skill, now I dont have to do the prompt salad to get it to do what I want

every agent i run has a claude.md and half of it is me begging it to stop doing one thing

I bookmarked it. LOL! Then thought I will never use that. You talk the truth. Great post.

The only skill you need is write this before every session “use plain English”

Well said Mo

Just for grins, I bookmarked your post about stop bookmarking these posts.

Glad someone is saying it.

But but but obsidian second brain.

Yes. This. - Fantastic. Very funny too lol.

skills are useful but only if you created them, for a specific workflow/result you have verified works in your usecase using other peoples skills blindly is only gonna increase confusion

I agree that people overdo it with concepts like software factories. But I also disagree that 100% vanilla is the solution. Every time a new model drops, the behavior often changes so drastically that I am forced to write a completely new AGENTS.md file to correct some of its bad behaviors. Then people complain about the new model on X, so they change the system prompt and other settings. This then forces me to readjust my AGENTS.md file again. So we're doing this little dance for 1 or 2 weeks until everything settles. And then maybe I can enjoy a week or two before the next model drops. One thing I changed permanently was cutting out most skills. The only skill I occasionally use is Matt's grill-me skill, which is often useful. But again, how useful it is really depends on the model. I find it's way more useful for a model like Claude, which naturally tends to use Markdown files as a memory and progress tracker. With Codex, even if I set up the perfect plan, if the task just runs long enough, even a perfect grill-me plan will not save me. We have a long way to go until coding is solved.

I guess, I am bookmarking this :D

Getting famous for a markdown file is just blogging with extra steps and worse formatting

Mo, another nice post! Interestingly, Markdown files with their thousand lines of magic enchantments, were predicted back in 1978 by Computer Scientist Edsger Dijkstra in his essay "Foolishness of Natural Language Programming". He showed the entropy of English leads to verbosity.

So true, excellent 👏

7:25 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣❤️❤️❤️

No still cracking me up! Go buy his course and bookmark this now!

100%, not to mention that these files eat a whole ton of tokens. Just this morning, my 5 hour window expired in less than 30 minutes while Opus 5.5 was writing changes. Safe to say that I'm not going to use it openspec anymore after today, or perhaps have a local model or Jev write the specs, but honestly, it's just cheaper to have a back and forth with the model.

LOL "go bookmark it" class act

Isn’t English the new code?

I can't play the piano but when music went digital, I didn't need to. Ableton, Pro Tools, etc still let me make things by trying ideas and fixing what didn’t work. This feels the same. I type what I want and refine the errors as I go. The markdown files (and sheet music 😁) aren’t part of the process for me.

I never defined some custom “be that” skills. IMHO it should be inferred from the context automatically and be the best version of that.

I have some Markdowns, but I don't have it for the AI, I have them for me. It's easier to point agent to a Markdown than trying to explain everything over and over because it's too much for poor AI memory which is btw. also just a fucking Markdown.

I honestly never understood these skills.md etc.. I've used the raw models for the past couple years and wondered why everyone is wasting their time.. with that said my repos have a lot of internal docs .md that is indexed in claude.md and agents.md that keeps the LLMs straight

jokes on them im going to bookmark it to never look at it again🤣

if you don't run my markdown on your markdown you're going to get left behind

“Go bookmark it.” Deadpan. 🤣

Lmao bro is on 🔥… keep going