Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | AndyNemmity's commentslogin

My experience agrees with this.

Which is why I use a skill that is a command, that routes requests to agents and skills.

reply


https://vexjoy.com/posts/

Writing about AI so far, but who knows. Just started it.


I use Hacker News commenters.

There was someone a while ago who made a funny post about the type of Hacker News commenters. So I have 5 of them that will review things, and ended up being way more effective than I ever imagined they'd be.

│ contrarian-provocateur-roaster │ Challenge premises, explore alternatives │ "Have you considered..."

│ enthusiastic-newcomer-roaster │ Accessibility, onboarding friction │ "Wait, how do I even..."

│ pragmatic-builder-roaster │ Operational reality, production concerns │ "This won't survive 3AM pages" │

│ skeptical-senior-roaster │ Long-term maintenance, sustainability │ "Who maintains this in 2 years?" │

│ well-actually-pedant-roaster │ Terminology precision, verifiability │ "Technically, that's not..." │


This sounds great :D feel like sharing the prompt?


Here is one of the agents. I prefer large agents, so you can tweak it to your purposes. It also calls some of my skills and other pieces, but it will give you the "gist" of it.

https://gist.github.com/notque/e57cb975a3df7780824ce4085a59a...


I keep having the same conversation with people struggling with Claude Code.

Someone tells me it "forgets" their instructions. Or it hallucinates fixes. Or it ignores the rules they put in CLAUDE.md. And when I ask what their setup looks like, it's always the same thing: a massive system prompt with every rule for every language, stuffed into context.

So I wrote up how I solve this.


These are excellent every year, thank you for all the wonderful work you do.


Same here. Simon is one of the main reasons I’ve been able to (sort of) keep up with developments in AI.

I look forward to learning from his blog posts and HN comments in the year ahead, too.


Don't forget you can pay Simon to keep up with less!

> At the end of every month I send out a much shorter newsletter to anyone who sponsors me for $10 or more on GitHub

https://simonwillison.net/about/#monthly


Exactly right, well said. None of these solutions work in this case for the reasons you outlined.

It will just as easily get around it by running it as a bash command or any number of ways.


and put it in all caps, so it knows you mean business.


alarm emoji alarm emoji alarm emoji


The funny part is, the vast majority of them are barely doing anything at all.

All of these systems are for managing context.

You can generally tell which ones are actually doing something if they are using skills, with programs in them.

Because then, you're actually attaching some sort of feature to the system.

Otherwise, you're just feeding in different prompts and steps, which can add some value, but okay, it doesn't take much to do that.

Like adding image generation to claude code with google nano banana, a python script that does it.

That's actually adding something claude code doesn't have, instead of just saying "You are an expert in blah"


It sounds like you've used quite a few. What programs are you expecting? Assuming you're talking about doing some inference on the data? Or optimizing for some RAG or something?


An example of a skill i gave, adding image generation to nano banana.

another is one claude code ships with, using rip grep.

Those are actual features. It's adding deterministic programs that the llm calls when it needs something.


Oh got it - tool use


Exactly. That adds actual value. Some of the 1000s of projects do this. Those pieces add value, if the tool adds value which also isn’t a given


> You can generally tell which ones are actually doing something if they are using skills, with programs in them.

> Otherwise, you're just feeding in different prompts and steps

"skills" are literally just .md files with different prompts and steps.

> That's actually adding something claude code doesn't have, instead of just saying "You are an expert in blah"

It's not adding anything but a prompt saying "when asked to do X invoke script Y or do steps Z"


Skill are md files, but they are not just that. They are also scripts. That's what adding things are. You can make a skill that is just a prompt, but that misses the point of the value.

You're packaging the tool with the skill, or multiple tools to do a single thing.


In the end it's still an .md file pointing to a script that ends being just a prompt for the agent that the agent may or may not pick up, may or may not discover, may or may not forget after context compaction etc.

There's no inherent magic to skills, or any fundamental difference between them and "just feeding in different prompts and steps". It literally is just feeding different prompt and steps.


I find in my experience that it's trivial to have the skill systematically call the script, and perform the action correctly. This has not been a challenge to me.

Also, the pick up or not pick up, or discover or may not discover is solved as well. It's handled by my router, which I wrote about here - https://vexjoy.com/posts/the-do-router/

So these are solved problems to me. There are many more problems which are not solved, which are the interesting space to continue with.


Yeah, at a certainly level, it's just a ton of fun to do. I think that's why so many of us are playing with it.

It's also deeply interesting because it's essentially unsolved space. It's the same excitement as the beginning of the internet.

None of us know what the answers will be.


It was happening significantly before the rise of AI. It's even more now.

I am not sure where exactly we are headed through all this, but I feel like overall having data be a shared commons has been beneficial.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: