Ask HN: I still don't understand why AI agents need "skills"

Posted by skeptic_ai 1 day ago

I’ve asked AI a few times and I still don’t get it.

Why do frameworks like Claude Code or Codex have the concept of “skills” instead of just using well-organized Markdown docs?

Couldn’t I just have an AGENTS.md that points to folders of .md files and tells the agent when to read them? That feels functionally equivalent to me.

What am I missing? Is there a real architectural benefit, or is it mostly a standardization/convenience thing?

I doubt we’d create so much hype about skills if they’d just be a md file that’s in a skills folder. So I feel I’m missing something.

Comments

Comment by infotainment 1 day ago

> Why do frameworks like Claude Code or Codex have the concept of “skills” instead of just using well-organized Markdown docs?

"Well-organized markdown docs" are exactly what skills are.

More specifically, they are well-organized markdown docs that explain how to do some particular thing.

Comment by getstowly 1 day ago

This. Skills are exactly that, well structured markdown documents. Its the same with AI agents. You define the structure, what it can and can't do, setup rules and guidelines and then the AI sticks to that exact model. I sell skills on marketplace because sometimes, crafting the perfect prompt can be hard - you want something specific and very particular and don't know how to ask AI to do that. This is where skills come in. You can create your own skills or get them from someone else. They're great.

Comment by kzzzznot 18 hours ago

How do you sell them - do you give a preview or how else do you protect it from just being copy/pasted?

Comment by kian 1 day ago

how much do you make selling skills on marketplace, just curious? It seems like it'd be impossible to vet a skill without reading it, so the entire concept mystifies me just a little bit.

Comment by getstowly 1 day ago

Usually only charge a few bucks because honestly, anyone can make them but those that buy get them because they don't want to spend the time on making them. You can sell them for $10 or $15, maybe more depending on the skill. Not always a lot but if you have a ton of them, you can make some serious cash.

Comment by greazy 1 day ago

Where are you selling them?

Comment by watchdog408 3 hours ago

A skill is more like a packaging convention around instructions, with the difference that the runtime knows it's a reusable unit. That lets it expose only the skill's name/description initially and load the full instructions (and sometimes bundled scripts or other resources) only when needed. Truth is that if you implemented the same lazy behavior with AGENTS.md and a bunch of Markdown files you'd end up with something that is functionally very close to a skills system.

Comment by moizrocky1 1 hour ago

Something like instructions in Projects? Or how? Could you please describe the pros and cons of each and when to use each?

That'd be truly helpful!

Comment by toplinesoftsys 1 day ago

Skill is a document that AI agent ignores, distorts and forgets immediately after reading it :)

Comment by qsera 1 day ago

It is just marketing speak to evoke some similarity to Sci-fi movies show AI robots learning stuff by quickly going books.

Nothing of the sort happens here though...

So you are not missing anything. What you think is exactly what it is. Just some prefix for preloading the LLM context with..

Comment by alexhans 1 day ago

Skills represent a pattern many of us converged to before it was named as such (very useful for comms): Progressive disclosure, determistic scripts bundled (not just markdowns). See past comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48132477

Don't underestimate the value of "Skill builder" skills too. Great UX

Comment by bad_username 1 day ago

Skills is just lazy loading of well-organized Markdown docs. The "lazy" part is the core part.

Comment by nijave 1 day ago

To add to what the other person said, they're also loaded differently than arbitrary docs.

They're presented as a list of titles and descriptions to the LLM and it can pick which ones seem relevant and load them.

Markdown docs the LLM needs to make a tool call to read the files and potentially multiple tool calls to discover data if there's a hierarchy. Additionally, it now has to decide if it should read the entire file or cherry pick parts of it.

Skills organize that in an atomic and composable way.

I think ChatGPT and Claude skills will also package arbitrary artifacts like scripts as well. Not sure if that's standard or not

Comment by sharts 1 day ago

Skills are lazy loaded. AGENTS.md is not. It’s stupid regardless.

Comment by bediger4000 1 day ago

Aren't "skills" just some words and syntax that tokenize in a fashion that gets an instance of an LLM primed for (you hope) the right thing statistically?

After that, I think "skill" is just a good name. It sounds more "AI" than a "spell" or "incantation", which would sound magical and esoteric.