I've been able to avoid this kind of markdown library architecture with very chatty tool feedback. Interaction with a responsive environment is much better than static chunks of "skill" text. For example, imagine a domain constraint:
"You must use tool ABC before calling tool XYZ"
This can either be in some static prompt scheme somewhere, or it can be the live result of a tool call.
If you make everything tool calling and environmental, you effectively have a lazily evaluated & dynamic prompt scheme.
I like to think of this as context for the context. The better you map the environment and descriptions of it to the agent, the less top-down prompting is required.
If you set up the harness correctly, you can run circles around a lot of what passes as AI innovation with powershell in a while loop. Adding static markdown document soup on top of this would only reduce performance in the general case.
Yup! I feel pretty strongly that every little nit pick and instruction you pass into your model is murdering your output. Having a hook that executes on tool calls is significantly better than telling your agent to follow your repos specific format/lint/style/test constraints
Skills for repitition are totally valid. Having a version control skill that explains that I use gitea works great. My point is that asking for a skill that tells us if our program will get stuck before taking on a halting problem won't get you any further than just starting the task with xhigh thinking
TL;DR don't have your agent write skills using only its latent knowledge, otherwise you may as well not use a skill in the first place and let it summon that latent knowledge on the fly.
Not sure if this take is correct though. I suspect self-generated skills help the agent avoid having to "decompress" its latent knowledge, which might save tokens? idk, I am not an expert
It seems so obvious: How would it know better than it already does?
Yet I’ve seen people succeed with „write me a prompt“ prompts. The model makes something up, often it makes sense.
They are like plans in that way: It’s not exactly novel knowledge, but it at least encodes it somewhere to make the process verifiable beforehand and a bit more repeatable.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it improves performance a little, just like thinking blocks do (every model reasons now).
"You must use tool ABC before calling tool XYZ"
This can either be in some static prompt scheme somewhere, or it can be the live result of a tool call.
If you make everything tool calling and environmental, you effectively have a lazily evaluated & dynamic prompt scheme.
I like to think of this as context for the context. The better you map the environment and descriptions of it to the agent, the less top-down prompting is required.
If you set up the harness correctly, you can run circles around a lot of what passes as AI innovation with powershell in a while loop. Adding static markdown document soup on top of this would only reduce performance in the general case.
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