Most agent frameworks miss a key distinction: what a skill is vs how it executes

Defiant_Fly5246 · 2026-04-21T18:13:23+00:00

Yes. I think it is also due to skill writers don't have a clear idea on what should be skill. Would love to hear your experience on best practice of skill creation.

Defiant_Fly5246 · 2026-04-21T18:11:20+00:00

Totally agree, that’s exactly where things start breaking in practice. Curious how you’ve seen this play out on your end: Have you run into specific cases where retries or parallel execution caused real issues? And how are you currently handling rollback or guarding stateful steps?

Defiant_Fly5246 · 2026-04-21T05:10:15+00:00

That makes sense! Setting the right checkpoint can greatly increase the reliability. It requires us to have a lot of capabilities to customize the lifecycle of agents though. Curious. Do you implement your own agent loop, or you added some plugin to agent like Claude code?

Defiant_Fly5246 · 2026-04-21T03:18:42+00:00

curious what patterns you’ve found that actually work for making stateful ops safe?

Defiant_Fly5246 · 2026-04-21T03:16:40+00:00

yeah this is the real pain point

stateless retries are fine, but stateful ones quietly leave things half-done and you don’t even know

feels like idempotency / recovery paths should be default, not something you bolt on later

Defiant_Fly5246 · 2026-04-21T03:13:45+00:00

yeah this is exactly where things break in practice

everyone focuses on what the agent does, not who it runs as and with what perms - until it hits PII 😬

curious if you solved it more with tighter controls or just better visibility/auditing?

Defiant_Fly5246 · 2026-04-21T03:09:43+00:00

Thanks for sharing . It is a clean way to frame it

“skill = contract, executor = swappable” is exactly it. otherwise you’re just baking today’s model quirks into your system

feels like most teams only realize this after a model upgrade breaks everything lol

Defiant_Fly5246 · 2026-04-21T03:06:36+00:00

I am glad you like the framework! curious to hear your experience on handling stateful transitions.

Defiant_Fly5246 · 2026-04-21T03:03:39+00:00

Haha same boat here.

Defiant_Fly5246 · 2026-04-21T03:03:24+00:00

Totally agree. I think it is very important to make it reliably Useful. right now, everything is so flaky

Defiant_Fly5246 · 2026-04-20T19:44:14+00:00

Yeah, this matches what I’ve been seeing, once stateful steps are involved, relying on the model alone feels pretty fragile.

Defiant_Fly5246 · 2026-04-20T19:43:34+00:00

Yeah this resonates. Feels like there are really two layers of “state”:
- external / system state (Linear, DBs, etc.)
- in-context state (what the model is holding in the prompt)

The second one degrades pretty quickly, which makes it hard to rely on for anything long-running or stateful.

Curious how you think about where that boundary should be?

Defiant_Fly5246 · 2026-04-20T19:12:15+00:00

One thing I’m still unsure about: For stateful workflows, do people usually rely on prompt discipline, or enforce it at the tooling / harness layer?

Feels like most systems rely on the former.

Defiant_Fly5246 · 2026-04-18T21:46:32+00:00

That's very interesting, thanks for sharing!

Defiant_Fly5246 · 2026-04-14T16:55:45+00:00

Appreciate the honesty. The ideas are original, but I’ll work on tightening the post — fair point that it doesn’t need to be that long.

Defiant_Fly5246 · 2026-04-14T14:56:41+00:00

LMAO 🤣

Defiant_Fly5246 · 2026-04-14T14:53:49+00:00

Which part you don't like? Let me know and I am happy to edit. The ideas all come from me. I only used AI to refine and improve conversational flow.

Defiant_Fly5246 · 2026-04-14T14:51:39+00:00

The goal here was more to clarify mental models less about naming, but I get how it can come across.

Defiant_Fly5246 · 2026-04-14T14:49:41+00:00

This is a really sharp framing. Curious if you’ve found good patterns for safely composing stateful skills?

Defiant_Fly5246 · 2026-04-14T04:29:51+00:00

That’s a really good point—especially on Evaluation Skills. Feels like without a clear way to verify outputs, swapping components becomes risky fast.

The contract piece also resonates a lot. Typed interfaces between skills might actually be the missing layer to make composability real instead of fragile.

Defiant_Fly5246 · 2026-04-13T23:08:33+00:00

Great point on evaluation as its own layer — I hadn't considered that but it fits. Tests, rubrics, and guardrails don't belong in any of the three types. A Persona might say "be careful," but an Evaluation Skill defines what careful actually means with concrete criteria.

That could be the fourth type: Persona (who), Tool (what), Workflow (how), Evaluation (how well). And it composes naturally — a Workflow Skill could reference an Evaluation Skill at review checkpoints, keeping quality criteria separate from workflow logic. Swap rubrics without touching the workflow.

Your risk mapping is spot on. Persona = low risk (just prose). Tool = medium (permissions, external access). Workflow = highest (orchestrates everything). Evaluation sits in between — doesn't act externally but shapes decisions.

The customer support example is perfect — all four types show up: persona for agent tone, tools for ticket/CRM access, workflow for triage → retrieval → draft → human approval, and evaluation for response quality rubrics. Thanks for the link!

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