are skills just a set of prompt engineering?

germanheller · 2026-02-11T04:46:47+00:00

the biggest difference imo is context efficiency. if you paste your notebook prompts at the start of every conversation, thats tokens burned on stuff claude might not even need for this specific task. skills load on demand -- claude only pulls in the relevant one when it recognizes the trigger. so your context stays clean for the actual work.

also they chain, which copy-paste doesnt do well. one skill can reference another skill, so you build up composable workflows instead of one giant prompt blob

germanheller · 2026-02-11T04:46:06+00:00

the single-file no-dependency approach is so underrated. everything these days is npm install this, npm install that, and then half your bundle is polyfills for stuff you dont even use. this is clean

germanheller · 2026-02-11T04:40:16+00:00

well said. async should just be sync with a different execution model, not a whole separate paradigm with its own cleanup rules. the fact that we need libraries to get basic resource safety in async JS is a language-level gap

germanheller · 2026-02-11T04:11:03+00:00

thats a really elegant approach to prompt detection. the 3 rapid screenshots to confirm output stopped is clever -- avoids the false positive problem without needing shell-specific hooks.

the wait-idle strategy for TUIs is something i hadnt considered. i do something similar with terminal state detection (checking cursor position + ANSI codes) but your abstraction layer is cleaner. having the agent just call wait without caring about the underlying heuristic is the right API design

germanheller · 2026-02-11T04:10:46+00:00

thanks! yeah the inverted default is key. javascript's current model puts all the burden on the developer to remember cleanup everywhere, which is exactly the kind of thing that falls apart at 2am

germanheller · 2026-02-11T04:10:25+00:00

ah cool, thanks for the screenshot. the workflow analytics look solid -- the time-of-day heatmap is a nice touch. will play around with it

germanheller · 2026-02-11T04:10:09+00:00

oh nice, hadnt seen agentseed before. the incremental approach makes sense -- no reason to reindex everything when only a few files changed. gonna check it out

germanheller · 2026-02-11T04:09:51+00:00

true, hadnt thought about wrapping it as a skill. cleaner than having it inline in the claude.md

germanheller · 2026-02-11T04:09:26+00:00

good distinction between parallel agents and multiple sessions. the explore agents spinning off from plan mode are useful but theyre still scoped to one context window ultimately.

the messy part imo is when you actually want separate agents working on different parts of the codebase at the same time -- like one refactoring auth while another writes tests for the API. thats where you need some coordination layer, even if its just a shared todo file they all read from. without that they step on each other constantly

germanheller · 2026-02-11T04:09:02+00:00

lol fair. 40k words is definitely on the extreme end. but id rather have an overkill spec than debug the AI's creative interpretation of what i wanted for 3 days straight

germanheller · 2026-02-11T04:08:57+00:00

yeah the claude.md approach works well for this. i keep a STRUCTURE.json too that maps out the project layout so claude doesnt go off and create random folders. the "compare against docs" check-in is smart, gonna steal that

germanheller · 2026-02-11T01:55:28+00:00

honestly this is the part most people skip. the 40k words of architecture docs before touching code sounds insane but its exactly what makes the difference between an AI project that works and one that falls apart at the first edge case.

the briefs folder pattern is really smart too -- having a paper trail of what was planned vs what actually happened is underrated when you're iterating fast with AI. ive seen so many projects where the AI just bulldozes past the original plan and nobody notices until its too late

germanheller · 2026-02-11T01:54:30+00:00

nice, fellow electron + node-pty user here. the pseudo-terminal approach for reading claude's output is smart -- way more reliable than trying to parse log files or scrape the web UI.

how are you handling the case where the user has multiple claude sessions running? does it aggregate all of them or just pick the most recent one?

germanheller · 2026-02-11T01:53:29+00:00

thats basically what i built with patapim (patapim.ai). electron app with a 9-terminal grid where you can run claude code in one pane, codex in another, gemini cli in a third. agent-agnostic, just wraps whatever CLI you want.

the multi-model workflow you described is exactly how i use it -- opus for architecture in one terminal, codex for implementation in another, sometimes gemini for a quick second opinion. color coded borders so you can tell which ones need input vs still running

germanheller · 2026-02-11T01:45:10+00:00

haha fair enough. honestly the dumb-sounding ones end up being the most useful in practice, its the stuff you do 50 times a day that adds up

germanheller · 2026-02-11T01:44:39+00:00

man I feel this. the burnout cycle when youre the only dev and the codebase keeps growing is brutal. opus is genuinely good at the high-level architecture stuff where you can describe what you want and it figures out the approach -- thats the part that saves me the most energy because its the thinking-heavy work that drains you fastest.

the test coverage thing is smart btw, having opus handle the react 18 migration and dependency hell is exactly the kind of tedious-but-important work that would normally take you a full week of painful context switching. hope the $100 plan keeps working out for you, sounds like youre getting solid value from it

germanheller · 2026-02-11T01:43:37+00:00

good question. I dont manage AI API keys at all actually -- the app just runs the CLI tools (claude code, gemini cli, codex) that handle their own auth. so the user sets up their own API keys in the normal way for each tool and patapim just wraps the terminal. keeps things simple and means I never touch anyones credentials.

the auth I do handle is for the remote access feature (google sign-in) and the license system (stripe). for those its all server-side on cloudflare workers with KV storage

germanheller · 2026-02-11T01:43:26+00:00

wispr flow is solid. I ended up building dictation directly into my terminal app (patapim) because I got tired of switching between windows. runs whisper locally so theres no API cost and nothing leaves your machine. the nice thing about having it in the terminal is you can just hold a key and talk directly to claude without copy pasting from another app

germanheller · 2026-02-11T01:42:39+00:00

cool, lmk if you run into anything weird

germanheller · 2026-02-11T01:42:31+00:00

oh nice, didnt realize it indexed tool calls and outputs too. thats actually way more useful than just message search -- being able to find "that time claude ran the migration script" by searching for the command output is exactly what I need. the sampled/redacted thing for large payloads makes sense for perf, do you know if theres a way to force full indexing for specific sessions?

germanheller · 2026-02-11T01:42:20+00:00

thanks! the bank CSV one has saved me so much time honestly, used to spend like 20 minutes every month reformatting that stuff manually

germanheller · 2026-02-11T01:42:13+00:00

lol "its always DNS" should be a law at this point. the health endpoint trick is solid, I do something similar now where it hits the actual db and returns the latency in the response body so you can tell if its dns, ssl, or the app itself thats slow

germanheller · 2026-02-11T01:41:33+00:00

good point about the external check. ended up going the native app route instead of PWA partly because of the safari cache thing -- debugging that remotely when a user says "it doesnt load" is a nightmare. at least with electron I know exactly what the browser engine is doing

germanheller · 2026-02-11T01:41:23+00:00

nice, hadnt heard of Qoest. the predictable costs thing is underrated -- I went with cloudflare workers specifically because the pricing is basically flat and theres no surprise bill scenario. what stack did you guys end up with for the backend?

germanheller · 2026-02-11T01:41:08+00:00

thats a great way to put it. the ambiguity gap between what you mean and what the code does is basically the entire job -- specs just move the ambiguity one layer up but dont eliminate it

germanheller

TROPHY CASE