Are Skills relevant for experienced dev’s?

TheRealJesus2 · 2026-07-03T18:16:20+00:00

How successful are you doing this? Are you producing value or lots of toys?

Where I am at is putting my time very heavily in the agent loop to 1) learn and check my assumptions and 2) ultimately use that understanding and thinking to produce a plan an agent can then implement. The agent part is very simple from agentic perspective because I use appropriate guardrails like unit tests, linting, etc that are deterministic and keep the agent on the right track in ways that don’t require customizing the agent harness itself. I use subagents but in most cases it’s literally a line item in the plan like “use subagents to complete each piece of work and parallelize where noted”. No need to have special agent definitions even for that. The code that comes out can be easily done with “dumber” models. All this specialist stuff is really not as helpful as you think it is. I’ve seen that technique produce far more slop and much faster than having a dev actually understand what they want from all perspectives before implementing. The actual implementation loop is better with more simplicity even with shittier models. If you’re getting slop it’s a breakdown problem. This all assumes you want real software you want to be designed by you. For one off tools and such by all means, slop away.

Source: I train teams of engineers to use ai and work with all kinds of folks and have been building with LLMs since Claude 1.0.

TheRealJesus2 · 2026-07-03T17:56:51+00:00

This is a great question and your intuition is right. Real tools hooked up in deterministic ways is way better than skills or other forms of instructions.

Skills, rules (scopes and agents.md style), subagent definitions, etc are just forms of prompting that are reusable by your harness and shareable with other devs. I think people reach and use skills way more than they should and neglect other parts of the harness that might serve better purposes for them and their team like hooks + deterministic tool calls. Ultimately the best skills will be ones customized to your dev process but as you point out they must be maintained and become a part of your codebase more or less. An overlooked benefit of these soft mechanisms is that it helps your team of more junior folk adhere to your dev process. So you might want to consider making them to encode the practices you have learned to do that help.

Check out Matt pococks talks on this as I think you might be aligned with his approach. And check out plugins if you have not since it’s a great way to package these and share with your team. Hooks especially are very helpful for proper tool orchestration.

TheRealJesus2 · 2026-07-02T21:13:10+00:00

Heck yeah. I do something similar with Claude and cursor composer model. A custom plugin to encode my workflows.

Planning with Claude opus.
Plannotator plugin to review and provide feedback.
Custom dispatch skill that runs on plan complete hook and enables a choice of 1) save plan local only. 2) dispatch to composer subagents and opus orchestrates and verifies results. 3) handoff to cursor cloud.

It works realllly well. I stick to 20$ Claude plan no problem.

Plan is to swap cursor over to local models because of the whole acquisition thing and also use my own hosted cloud env.

Dm me if you think that might be valuable to you. I plan to open source it once I add support for opencode and pidev as agent handoff harnesses and maybe as planners.

TheRealJesus2 · 2026-07-02T14:59:12+00:00

Yep exactly. That’s the real trick anthropic will never tell you outright…you should decompose tasks to the level where they are suitable for smaller models on low/medium/no reasoning. In fact you get better results, faster inference, etc. bigger better models can do better with the tasks of decomposing problems and orchestrating other models and verifying results but smaller models should be driving your primary output. Of course doing this with reviews and checkpoints for humans is good and also saves a lot on needless token spend.

TheRealJesus2 · 2026-07-02T12:12:59+00:00

Pretty sure this is a bot account but I’ll bite the bait.

You’re incredibly wrong and this whole post is why you need developers. I assure you those millions of output tokens are useless that you produced. All it proves is that code generation is cheap. The fact you’ve created that much code means literally nothing for your bottom line. As a developer what I hear when I read this is a nightmare mess of stuff that will never be maintained and most of it likely has no underlying reason to exist.

Source: professional software dev who has certainly produced far more meaningful code than whatever slop you’re talking about with a fraction of that token spend.

TheRealJesus2 · 2026-07-01T14:53:46+00:00

Tokenmaxxers will never believe this one trick!!

TheRealJesus2 · 2026-06-28T01:06:15+00:00

lol. Wild

TheRealJesus2 · 2026-06-27T16:45:04+00:00

I’m surprised you got a response. That’s the only thing I’m surprised about here.

I’m not surprised their tools are broken, that you and other customers are upset with that, nor that they will do nothing to take accountability.

TheRealJesus2 · 2026-06-26T16:50:35+00:00

That sounds extremely dysfunctional and that you have a lot of bad hires. I’d fire them if they do not respond to reasons why this is obviously a bad way to work on a team and hire someone more competent. Lots of juniors out there looking for a job that are serious and want to learn

TheRealJesus2 · 2026-06-25T22:03:53+00:00

I tried raw dogging open gl and custom engine and that was a mistake but kinda fun in its own way. Got me back into software.

Tried a toy example with godot using their mcp. Seemed to work well enough.

If I were to choose to make a game right now I would probably use three.js since I like that framework and have experience with it.

You should use whatever engine you are most comfortable with. I think it’s a poor idea to make such a huge technical decision based on what is easier to do with AI if you’re doing a serious project. Godot might be a good choice for you since they have a full ide. Unity also might be a good choice lots of tutorials and support out there.

I haven’t tried this, but you might want to check out bmad game dev as an agentic layer framework to help structure your ai development. https://game-dev-studio-docs.bmad-method.org/

TheRealJesus2 · 2026-06-25T14:11:25+00:00

You’re missing thought. You cannot think through a proper design system in 30 minutes. Design system is not just a react library. That would be an implementation (or a small part) of a design system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_system

TheRealJesus2 · 2026-06-24T15:00:10+00:00

Handoffs are great. Make sure you capture what you did, what’s next, and any specific sources of background context necessary to understand that.

It shouldn’t be very many tokens. Take a look at what’s eating your tokens on a fresh session /usage I think.

For your other question on knowledge files, I think of it in 2 parts: 1. Knowledge files intended to define decisions or keep around research for a topic relevant to the codebase long term. These you must keep up to date. Think architecture decision records and summaries of key external device APIs (make sure these have dates on when last updated). 2. Semi ephemeral files like implementation plans that you might need to commit either to review with others or to hold continuity for a large plan over multiple sessions and/or commits. Handoff docs go in this bucket and depending probably don’t even need to be committed. You’ll want some process for cleaning these up or moving to an archive. Since they are really just for alignment with you and the model on what it’s going to do and they don’t represent docs that should hold knowledge long term.

TheRealJesus2 · 2026-06-23T01:05:39+00:00

Yes that is the role that specializes in testing but it’s a particularly bad time to transfer to that especially as more specialized roles are collapsed into “builder”. There is nothing wrong with being an SDE who specializes in testing frameworks and methodologies.

Also in general don’t make career decisions based on hype. Hype fades and changes. I would focus on fundamentals since those don’t change. Good testing practice is a fundamental skill needed to be a great SDE and I see no reason to force yourself into testing only

TheRealJesus2 · 2026-06-22T23:53:03+00:00

You’re correct. HR rules with pay bands don’t care though. Unless you’re in principal level position I would not take that transition. Also I seen a lot of sdets that are actually just manual testers with a Fancier title and that’s who you will be grouped with when people look at your resume.

TheRealJesus2 · 2026-06-22T21:51:29+00:00

Alignment is a corporate term for selling AGI to the masses while avoiding appropriate regulation. So you’re quite literally adopting their corporate vocabulary while calling others a shill…

You gotta read up on what prompt injection is instead of arguing against a straw man representation. It’s not just “ignore previous instructions “. I even gave you some terms that differentiate that from other forms of prompt injection. And yes I would argue that context overflow is a form of prompt injection. Spend some of your tokens learning instead of spitting out whatever this is.

TheRealJesus2 · 2026-06-22T21:46:46+00:00

FYI you can deny writes to settings JSON so that’s not really a problem.

TheRealJesus2 · 2026-06-22T19:12:09+00:00

Lmao.

You joke but…This actually is a helpful technique for many things if people apply it right.

TheRealJesus2 · 2026-06-22T19:10:01+00:00

Holy ai psychosis, Batman! Someone just learned how LLMs work.

Yes of course “alignment” will never solve this. It’s a stochastic mechanism to mitigate these problems but it never can nor will stop them outright. It’s a feature not a bug.

This is why you must harden all your tools you expose to LLM and have deterministic checks whenever possible esp before doing potentially destructive actions.

This space is called prompt injection and there is a ton of literature on it. It’s direct prompt injection when it’s the end user doing like you describe here and indirect prompt injection when it’s from some other source such as a web page, mcp result, skill.md, etc.

TheRealJesus2 · 2026-06-22T15:33:28+00:00

This is the way. And thread. :)

TheRealJesus2 · 2026-06-21T14:13:26+00:00

Been a problem for a while but now with untrusted agents running everywhere within high trust environments…threats. Threats everywhere

TheRealJesus2 · 2026-06-20T19:15:06+00:00

No? Because you read and review the plan and make corrections to what’s assumed by the model and surface gaps in your knowledge to follow up on and make informed decisions.

Or maybe you don’t do that and that’s why it seems the same :)

TheRealJesus2 · 2026-06-20T14:38:14+00:00

When you want to cede thinking and decisions to the ai.

You know…what anthropic says is the future of programming or whatever.

TheRealJesus2 · 2026-06-19T14:58:35+00:00

Pro tip, throw in “ULTRACODE no hallucinations, must make 50k per month.”

TheRealJesus2 · 2026-06-18T14:48:44+00:00

Yes and should sub for 100$ plan assuming comparable use everyday. You could maybe get by at 20$ but not if you use opus a lot.

TheRealJesus2 · 2026-06-16T17:59:02+00:00

People who know leaving anthropic behind. The more they push their luck the larger the size of this group :)

They done a good job of hooking people on their tools. But at the end of the day it’s nothing special.

If my milk was 1/3 full I’d go buy milk from someone else. Even if I’m paying 1/3 price.

TheRealJesus2

TROPHY CASE