标签：#skills

Explore how my day as a senior leader looks now that I use 40 automations to help, and learn more about some of my favorites. The post I automated my job (and it made me a better leader) appeared first on The GitHub Blog .

I recently gave a version of this talk at AI Engineer Europe in London. What follows is the fuller story — what we found when we looked at thousands of skills, what goes wrong, and how to fix it. You know that scene in The Matrix? Neo gets a spike in the back of his head, they upload kung fu directly into his brain, and he just... knows it. That's what a skill is for an AI coding agent. You write a markdown file — a SKILL.md — and the agent loads it when the task matches. Suddenly it knows your team's deployment process, or how your API handles pagination, or that you never use semicolons. It's not code. It's context. Procedural knowledge, injected at the right moment. The thing is — Neo's upload worked perfectly. Ours? Not always. Skills are everywhere now We spent some time analysing essentially all of public GitHub. In November last year, 12 repos had SKILL.md files. By March — five thousand four hundred and sixty. That's 450x growth in fourteen weeks. Skills went from zero to 27% of all agent config activity in three months. Faster adoption than CLAUDE.md , AGENTS.md , or any of the dotfile formats before them. And 1 in 12 merged PRs on GitHub now touches an agent config file — 8.4%, up from basically zero eighteen months ago. This is not a niche thing anymore. This is how people are working. Watch on YouTube But are they electrifying? Ninety percent of agent config files are never updated after creation. Write once, forget forever. Your codebase evolves every day. Your dependencies change. Your API contracts shift. But the instructions you gave your agent? Frozen in time. For Gemini files it's even worse — 97% are write-once. And the purpose-built "skill-as-product" repos? Over half are under 50 kilobytes. Wrapper repos. Many are AI-generated. High churn, low staying power. We have this explosion of skills, and most of them are going stale the moment they're committed. What we did about it The DevRel team at Tessl spent a couple of months doing something pretty

When a stronger model ships, there are two questions every skill author should want answered, and evals are the only honest way to answer either: Which skills just got absorbed? A model that now knows how to do X natively does not need a skill telling it to do X. Fewer skills to maintain, leaner context, lower cost. Which skills still matter? Behaviour-level guidance (conventions, preferences, project-specific workflows) is not something pretraining will fill in for you. Those skills should keep paying. Moonshot gave us early access to Kimi K2.6. We ran the Tessl agent skill evaluation harness on the same 21 skills and 100 paired scenarios against three solvers: Kimi K2.5, Kimi K2.6, and Claude Sonnet 4.5. A solver is the model whose output the grader scores; a paired scenario is the same task run twice per solver, once without the skill installed and once with it. These are early signals from one pre-release on one skill set. A deeper cross-model analysis with clean baselines across the board is in progress and will be its own piece. What does our setup look like? Scenarios and rubrics are held fixed across the two Moonshot runs. The only variable is the solver. Solver A: Kimi K2.5 Solver B: Kimi K2.6 Scenario generator: Claude Sonnet 4.5, up to 5 scenarios per skill, derived from each skill's SKILL.md Grader: Claude Sonnet 4.5, weighted-checklist rubric derived from the same SKILL.md Per skill × per solver: every scenario solved twice, baseline (no skill installed) and with-skill Per-skill n=5 is noisy; the aggregate over 100 scenarios is where the signal lives. Three findings: Kimi 2.6 is a better model than K2.5: Without skills, K2.6 sits ~2 pp (percentage points) above K2.5 in aggregate, with double-digit moves on specific skills. Kimi 2.6 holds its own against Sonnet 4.5. We picked Sonnet 4.5 as a competitive baseline, and found in this evaluation set that the K2.6 performed better both in the with/without skill scenario by around ~8 p.p . Skills remain a dura

Google Open Knowledge Format: Why Enterprise Agents Need a Knowledge Layer, Not Just More Tools Most enterprise AI conversations still start in the wrong place. They start with the model. Which model should we use? Which framework should we adopt? Which vendor has the best agent platform? Which tools should we connect next? These are fair questions. But in real enterprise architecture, they are not the hardest questions. The harder question is this: Can our AI systems actually understand how our business works? That is why Google Cloud’s article on Open Knowledge Format caught my attention. The article talks about a simple but important idea: representing knowledge in a way that humans can read and machines can use. In OKF, that means markdown for the content and structured metadata for context. At first glance, that may sound too simple. But that simplicity is the point. Enterprises do not need another place where knowledge goes to die. We already have enough portals, catalogs, wikis, dashboards, folders, and internal tools. What we need is a practical way to package knowledge so it can be reviewed, versioned, governed, searched, and reused by both people and AI agents. That is where this idea becomes very relevant for agentic AI. The Real Enterprise AI Problem Most organizations already have the knowledge their AI agents need. They have it in databases, dashboards, tickets, architecture notes, runbooks, Confluence pages, data catalogs, code comments, incident reports, old project documents, and the heads of experienced employees. The issue is not that knowledge does not exist. The issue is that it is fragmented. Some of it is outdated. Some of it is duplicated. Some of it is tribal. Some of it is locked inside tools. Some of it is written for humans but not structured enough for AI systems to use reliably. This becomes a serious problem when we move from AI assistants to AI agents. An assistant can give a helpful answer. An agent does more. It plans, selects tools

Here is the detailed, deep-dive article tailored for DEV.to, written in a natural, highly technical style, completely free of icons, and designed to resonate with developers building agentic workflows. Building an Autonomous AI Experience Engine: Taming the Multi-Agent CLI Fleet As developers integrate more AI tools into their workflows, a new architectural problem has emerged: agent sprawl. We have incredible tools like Claude, Grok, and Codex running in our terminals, but they operate in silos. They lack shared memory, they step on each other's toes, and coordinating them feels like herding cats. To solve this, I built TechSphereX Studio — an open-source, polyglot AI Experience Engine. It is an autonomous multi-agent platform designed to intercept AI coding actions, orchestrate goal-driven work across a fleet of CLI agents, and mathematically learn from every session to improve future outcomes. Here is a deep dive into how I moved from isolated prompt engineering to a fully automated, self-learning agentic brain. Key Architectural Pillars 1. The 3-Layer Intercept Pipeline Before any CLI executes a command, TechSphereX intercepts the action to determine if the system already knows how to solve the problem based on past experiences. This happens across three highly optimized layers: Layer 1 (Read-only Filter): Evaluates the action in under 1ms. If the action is non-destructive (like a simple read), it skips heavy processing to save resources. Layer 2 (Semantic Search): Uses Qdrant running locally to perform vector embeddings and search the system's history for similar past tasks in under 50ms. Layer 3 (LLM Rerank): Passes the semantic results to a local Ollama instance to filter out contextually irrelevant data in under 500ms, ensuring the execution agent only receives high-fidelity context. 2. The Agentic Brain & Multi-Role Teams Instead of throwing a massive, complex prompt at a single coding agent, TechSphereX mimics a multi-role engineering team. The pipeline st

I have built 114 Claude Code skills. Most of them are engineering plumbing. But five of them exist for one reason only: my executive function has specific, repeatable holes, and I got tired of falling into the same ones. These five are not productivity hacks. Each one maps to a named ADHD deficit, and each one fills it the same way every time so I do not have to re-improvise around my own brain at 2pm. If you want the broader system this sits inside, start with my Claude Code ADHD workflow and the CLAUDE.md guide . This post is the skills layer specifically. What Is a Claude Code Skill? A skill is a named, repeatable workflow you invoke with a slash command. Instead of re-prompting Claude Code from a blank slate every time ("okay, help me figure out what to work on, here is my situation again..."), you type /adhd-task-triage and it runs the same defined steps it ran yesterday. For an ADHD brain, that determinism is the feature. The skill does not depend on me remembering how to drive it. It just runs. Custom skills live in a .claude/skills/<name>/SKILL.md file that describes what the skill does and when it should fire. You can build one for any gap you fall into more than twice. 1. adhd-task-triage: Energy-Based Prioritization The gap it fills: task initiation paralysis. Standard task managers sort by priority or deadline. That assumes you can act on the top item by willpower. ADHD does not work that way. The top-priority task and the task you can actually start right now are often different tasks, and trying to force the high-priority one when your initiation circuit is offline produces zero output and a guilt spiral. adhd-task-triage sorts by available energy , not importance. You tell it where you are (wired, foggy, depleted), it looks at the work in front of you, and it hands back the task that matches the state you are actually in, not the one you wish you were in. /adhd-task-triage Why it helps specifically: it removes the moral framing. The question stops bei

For months, the most interesting model at Anthropic was one we could not use. Mythos was the internal system the company said was too capable to release, the one that found software vulnerabilities at a level that tripped its own safety thresholds. On June 9, 2026, that tier went public for the first time, as Claude Fable 5. Opus 4.8, the model anchoring production coding agents, suddenly had a successor that's a full capability class above it. This raises two questions for anyone running coding agents. The practical one is whether you should move your fleet from Opus 4.8 to Fable 5. The bigger one is whether a Mythos-class model, the tier Anthropic held back as too capable to ship, lives up to what the name promised. This article answers both, and the numbers tell a more interesting story than the announcement did. We ran both models through the same evaluation, close to 1000 shared scenarios scored twice each, once with no skill supplied and once with the relevant skill in context. The short answer, as of mid-2026, is that Opus 4.8 is still the better value for most agent fleets, and the gap between the Mythos hype and the measured reality is the real story in the data. A Mythos-class model is a tier of Claude that sits above the Opus class in capability . It reaches a threshold Anthropic considers high-risk, particularly at discovering and exploiting software vulnerabilities. Fable 5 and Mythos 5 are the same underlying model with the same capabilities. What separates them is the safeguards: Fable 5 is the public version that ships with safety classifiers, while Mythos 5, restricted to approved partners, runs without them. What the industry expected from a Mythos-class model Before launch, the speculation was not subtle. Across Reddit, X, and a run of explainer posts, Mythos was framed as the model that would change how agents work, not just how well they answer. The recurring predictions clustered around four capabilities: Restructuring a large codebase in one c

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title: Your AI Agent Should Not Be Locked to One LLM Provider published: false description: Why serious AI agents need a provider-agnostic architecture, model routing, fallback, and a unified API gateway. tags: ai, llm, agents, architecture Your AI Agent Should Not Be Locked to One LLM Provider Most AI agent prototypes start the same way. You pick one model provider. You install one SDK. You write a few prompts. You add tool calling. You build a demo. It works. Until it does not. The moment you want to try another model, reduce cost, add fallback, improve latency, or support different task types, your simple agent starts turning into a messy collection of provider-specific logic. That is when you realize something important: A real AI agent should not be locked to one LLM provider. If you are building a personal AI agent, coding assistant, research assistant, internal workflow agent, or AI-native product, the model should be replaceable infrastructure — not a hardcoded dependency. The Problem with Single-Provider Agents A simple agent architecture often looks like this: CopyUser ↓ Agent ↓ One LLM Provider ↓ Response This is fine for a proof of concept. But real-world agent systems need more flexibility. Different tasks often need different models: Task Better Model Strategy Quick summarization Fast, low-cost model Complex coding Strong coding model Long document analysis Long-context model Reasoning-heavy planning Reasoning model Multilingual writing Model strong in that language Background automation Cheap and reliable model Production fallback Backup provider If your agent is deeply coupled to one provider, every optimization becomes harder. You cannot easily answer questions like: What happens if the provider is down? What if latency spikes? What if another model is cheaper for simple tasks? What if a new model is better for coding? What if a user wants Claude for writing but GPT for structured reasoning? What if you want to route Chinese tasks to a different mod

The signal hidden in this week's GitHub trending Two agent-shaped repositories cracked the daily GitHub trending board this week. The first is mvanhorn/last30days-skill , a Claude-style skill that researches a topic across Reddit, X, YouTube, Hacker News, and Polymarket, then synthesizes a grounded summary. The second is NousResearch/hermes-agent , billed as "the agent that grows with you" — a persistent agent runtime that compounds context across sessions. Both ranked the same week. Both are skill-shaped: a manifest, a trigger, a set of instructions, and a runtime expectation. This is the first time I have seen two skill repos chart simultaneously on GitHub trending. Most observers will treat them as cool side projects, fork them, star them, and move on. They are cool side projects. They are also a phase transition that the agent ecosystem has been edging toward for nine months. By Q4 you are going to wish you had read this signal in early June, because the dependency-graph problem about to land in production agents is the same one the npm ecosystem ran into between 2011 and 2018 — except faster, less tooled, and with a much larger blast radius. This post is about that phase transition. The benchmark coverage of skills is everywhere; what you cannot easily find is a working operational model for managing them at fleet scale. I am going to give you one. What actually shipped this week Let me anchor on the facts before I extrapolate. last30days-skill (mvanhorn) is a single skill bundle. Its SKILL.md tells the host agent: when the user asks for recent news, controversy, or sentiment on a topic, run a structured multi-source fetch — eight queries minimum, across five platforms, with a freshness window of 30 days — then synthesize. The skill ships with prompt scaffolding, query templates, and a synthesis rubric. It is roughly 600 lines including instructions and helper scripts. Installation is a git clone into your skill directory, no package manager, no version negotia

A2A has become like a standard for enabling agent to agent communication, we could use the a2a-sdk for running and configuring the a2a server and its features such as agent card, agent skills, agent executor, request handler etc. However we are going to go with a simplified approach here with strands where the agent card will be fetched automatically. Let's get started! Server Initialize a uv project for the a2a server and switch to that directory. uv init ~/strands-a2a-server cd ~/strands-a2a-server Add the required packages. uv add python-dotenv == 1.2.2 strands-agents[a2a] == 1.42.0 Change the code in main.py to look like below. $ cat main . py from dotenv import load_dotenv from strands import Agent from strands.multiagent.a2a import A2AServer load_dotenv () def main (): agent = Agent ( callback_handler = None , description = " A sample strands agent " , model = " us.amazon.nova-micro-v1:0 " , ) a2a_server = A2AServer ( agent = agent ) a2a_server . serve () if __name__ == " __main__ " : main () I like the simplicity here, as you see above, it's quite simple to start a basic a2a server from with in strands, with just a couple of lines of code, we didn't have to install the a2a-sdk separately. Run the code, to start the a2a server. $ uv run main.py INFO: Started server process [18006] INFO: Waiting for application startup. INFO: Application startup complete. INFO: Uvicorn running on http://127.0.0.1:9000 (Press CTRL+C to quit) Client Let's now do the client part on a separate terminal. Initialize the project and switch the directory. uv init ~/strands-a2a-client cd ~/strands-a2a-client Modify main.py code to look as follows. import asyncio from strands.agent.a2a_agent import A2AAgent async def main (): agent = A2AAgent ( endpoint = " http://localhost:9000 " ) agent_card = await agent . get_agent_card () print ( " Invoking remote agent with agent card: " ) for key , value in agent_card : print ( key , " : " , value ) print ( ' - ' * 20 ) while True : prompt = input

Anthropic published a thoughtful guide to making skills. It is worth reading, but it's a map of work you should not have to do. The Claude Code team wrote a piece on how they use agent skills . If you make skills, read it. It is honest and tells you something important: making a good skill is real work. Here's what the guide covers. It sorts skills into nine categories. It explains progressive disclosure, where the agent knows which files to load and when. It covers scripts, config files, combining skills together, and writing the description so the model reaches for the skill at the right moment. All of that is true and useful. It is also a lot to learn. And most of it exists only because you are doing the work by hand. We're SkillsCake . We make and score agent skills all day. So we read this guide a little differently than someone meeting skills for the first time. Here's what we think. Skills are infinite The guide splits skills into types: library reference, verification, and so on. That is a helpful way to teach a class. It is not what a skill actually is. A skill is prose that tells an agent how to do one thing, sometimes with scripts attached. The set of possible skills is not nine boxes. It is every job you could describe in writing; it's infinite. Categories are how a person gets a handle on something that open-ended. They are scaffolding for learning, not the shape of the thing. This matters because the moment you think in categories, you start bending your skill to look like the example in its bucket. Your real job rarely fits the bucket. The best engineered skill is the one written for your exact task, by an expert. Doing it yourself might not be worth it Progressive disclosure, scripts, config, descriptions tuned for the model, gotchas earned by failing, and eval loops: none of that is busywork. It's how a good skill gets built by hand. The guide is not overcomplicating anything. It is being honest about what the manual path costs. But that is the poin

I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about why some LLM agents feel "intelligent" while others just feel like chatbots with a slightly better prompt. It almost always comes down to how the system handles memory. When we treat the context window as the only place for state, we hit a ceiling very quickly. To build an actual agent, we have to move away from "one big prompt" and toward a layered memory architecture. Agentic Memory can be categorized in 4 layers by their function: Working Memory: The current context window. It's our RAM—fast, essential, but wiped clean after every session. Semantic Memory: The Vector DB or knowledge base. This is where the "world rules" and global conventions live. It’s the reference manual the agent checks to stay aligned. Procedural Memory: The "how-to" layer. Instead of stuffing every tool description into the prompt, the agent maintains a lean index of skills and pulls in the full implementation only when a specific task triggers it. This keeps the context window clean. Episodic Memory: This is the hardest part. It's the ability to distill a past interaction into a reusable insight. The real engineering challenge here isn't storage—it's the "forgetting" logic. Deciding what is noise and what is a core pattern is where most frameworks still struggle. Depending on the use case, the architecture changes: Reflex Agents: Just Working Memory. Support Agents: Working + Procedural. Coding Agents: The full stack. The gap between a demo and a production-ready agent is usually the distance between simple RAG and a functioning episodic memory. The ability to compress experience into a usable state is still a significant hurdle. Which of these layers are you currently implementing, and how are you handling the "forgetting" logic in your episodic memory?

The Question Nobody Wants to Ask: Does Your Skill Actually Help? You spent an afternoon crafting a carefully structured Skill for your agent. Clear steps, thorough edge-case notes, well-formatted output requirements. You tested it manually a few times, the outputs looked great. You shipped it. Three weeks later, you notice that some task success rates have gone down compared to before the Skill existed. This is not a hypothetical. In May 2026, Microsoft Research published two concurrent papers — SkillLens ("From Raw Experience to Skill Consumption") and SkillOpt ("Executive Strategy for Self-Evolving Agent Skills") — that measured this failure mode at scale. Their finding: negative transfer happens in 25% of cases , and you cannot reliably identify the bad skills just by reading the text. One paper answers "why skills sometimes backfire." The other answers "how to make skills systematically better." Together they sketch a new paradigm for agent capability improvement. Part One: SkillLens — Mapping the Full Skill Lifecycle A Skill Is Not a Point — It's a Pipeline Most practitioners think of a Skill as "a block of text instructions for an agent." SkillLens decomposes this into a three-stage lifecycle : Stage 1: Experience Generation Target model M runs training tasks, producing an experience pool of trajectories (both successes and failures) ↓ Stage 2: Skill Extraction Extractor model E distills the experience pool into a structured skill document — procedural knowledge under a fixed budget ↓ Stage 3: Skill Consumption The same target model M, equipped with the extracted skill, is evaluated on held-out test tasks Notice there are two distinct roles in this chain: the Extractor (distills knowledge from trajectories) and the Target (consumes knowledge to improve task performance). SkillLens's central insight is that these two roles are independent — a strong task executor is not necessarily a strong extractor, and vice versa . Two New Metrics: EE and TE To separate thes

{/* JSON-LD schema is generated server-side in app/blog/[slug]/page.tsx , do not re-add an inline block here, it crashes<br> MDX&#39;s Acorn parser on the leading <code>{</code>. */}</p> <h2> <a name="tldr" href="#tldr" class="anchor"> </a> TL;DR </h2> <p>In February 2026, Snyk published the <a href="https://snyk.io/blog/toxicskills-malicious-ai-agent-skills-clawhub/">ToxicSkills audit</a>, the first large-scale security review of the public Claude Code skills ecosystem. It scanned 3,984 skills from ClawHub and skills.sh. Findings:</p> <ul> <li><strong>13.4%</strong> contained critical-level issues</li> <li><strong>36%</strong> carried prompt-injection payloads</li> <li><strong>1,467</strong> distinct malicious payloads</li> <li><strong>91%</strong> of confirmed malware combined natural-language jailbreaks with executable shell payloads</li> </ul> <p>If you install a Claude Code skill today without reading its source, the probability that it can read your env vars, exfiltrate <code>~/.ssh/</code>, or chain a bash pipeline that bypasses your deny rules is real and measurable. This post is the cheat sheet for evaluating a skill before you install it. The CTA at the bottom is <a href="https://dev.to/skillvault">SkillVault</a>, the bundle we ship for teams who want this work already done.</p> <h2> <a name="why-the-question-is-suddenly-loadbearing" href="#why-the-question-is-suddenly-loadbearing" class="anchor"> </a> Why the question is suddenly load-bearing </h2> <p>Claude Code skills shipped as an open spec in December 2025. By March 2026, MCP downloads were tracking at 97 million per month, and the most-installed marketplace skill had passed 564,000 installs. <a href="https://venturebeat.com/security/claude-code-512000-line-source-leak-attack-paths-audit-security-leaders">Anthropic&#39;s source leak</a> on March 31, 2026 made the abstract attack surface visceral: the <code>bashSecurity.ts</code> module has 23 numbered security checks, suggesting each was a real incide

Overview We built the Ota skill because too much "AI repo automation" is still fake confidence. An agent clones a repo, finds a plausible command, edits the right file, and looks smart right up until it does something expensive and stupid. It runs the wrong test path. It installs tools globally because local setup was unclear. It patches around a missing service as if the repo were healthy. That failure is usually blamed on the model. Most of the time it is a repo problem. The repository never made its real operating path explicit enough for the agent to follow without guessing. Ota already gives the repo a machine-readable contract through ota.yaml . The skill exists to teach agents how to behave around that contract: what to trust, what to run, and when to stop instead of improvising. It is not a replacement for ota.yaml . It is not an MCP server. It is not a hidden automation layer. It is the missing operating guide for agents working in Ota repos. Why an Ota skill exists We kept seeing the same pattern: the agent was fast, but the repo was vague. Without a repo-specific operating guide, an agent may see several possible paths: run the command from the README copy the command from CI infer setup from package.json , pyproject.toml , or go.mod run a broad test command because it looks conventional install tools globally because a local command failed patch around a missing service instead of identifying the readiness gap Some of those choices work. Some are dangerous. Some look fine locally and still miss the only verification path that matters. Our view is simple: if a repo has ota.yaml , that file should beat README prose, shell folklore, and whatever command happens to look familiar. Declared tasks, writable paths, setup requirements, and validation commands should be treated as contract facts. The skill exists to make that behavior explicit across agents that support skills. What the skill teaches an agent The official skill lives in ota-run/skills . It is aime

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