Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
00:38:17 · Mihail Eric
[00:38:17] S1: Yeah. Yeah. And I think all this is a... So a little bit of an extension from a single kind of function tool calling, MCP, right, using... Interacting with third party external services, and then extending into what you would call procedures. Like, how do you automate some set of actions over and over again that you then formalize in the form of a SkillMD or something like that? So I think just making that a little bit more, giving people exercise in codifying some of those procedures. I think what I'll also sort of include here is a few kind of fun skills that I think are good to use. Like, I think Matt Pocock's, like, real knee is a good one. And then I... There's ones that I also, from... More from the educational perspective, like Geoffrey Litt. He has this, like, explain diff, which I think becomes especially interesting once you start talking about code review because, you know, the whole Understand the code. Understand the code. Exactly. Yeah. You gotta understand the code. And and, I don't know if you guys have used that, but effectively, like, you run... You know, you have your your your kind of... The the the diff you've put in your code, and then you run the skill. And at the end of it, you have this... Not only, like, kind of a visual representation of what's happened, so you can, you know, kind of skim it and understand what's what's actually at the core of it. But then, what I really liked was this almost, like, quiz at the end of, at the end of it, where you go through and sort of, like, really reinforce what you understand what's happening. And I think that that level of interactive sort of back and forth, I think, is quite nice.
00:39:34 · Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric, S2
[00:39:34] S0: Yeah. There's there's a couple blog posts in this domain that I really like to bring up. There's one, I think, recently, which is, like, kind of... There's no situation in which turning your brain off is a good idea. Like, you know? And and I think these skills actually force you to turn brain on. And when everyone wants to use coding, just turn brain off. They're just like, me an app and get... Read my mind and guess... Get everything correct without me telling you about it. [00:39:57] S1: That's right. [00:39:58] S0: But, like, a lot of these skills are mostly in the genre of like, no, no, like ask me more questions, please. Like Yeah. [00:40:04] S2: I think there's a lot more output than people are used to. Like I can type in a one line prompt and get tens of thousands of lines of code and a whole structure. [00:40:13] S0: It's like, look at my productivity guys. [00:40:16] S2: But more effectively you should know what you're working on. You can really be put out of touch out of the loop. You should spend more time thinking about what you're actually doing. Doing the work and getting the code written is much easier than it was. [00:40:33] S1: Yeah. Yeah. The understanding there's no no excuse for, for sure. [00:40:36] S0: Sorry. What is a web skill? [00:40:38] S1: Yeah. So, I mean, effectively, the skills that interact with, like, the web itself. With computer use. Computer use. Yeah. Things like this. [00:40:44] S0: Anything else? [00:40:45] S1: I mean, mainly things that involve, like, pulling, pulling information from the web. I think it's...
00:40:45 · Mihail Eric, S2, Shawn Wang
[00:40:45] S1: I mean, mainly things that involve, like, pulling, pulling information from the web. I think it's... [00:40:49] S2: Okay. Are there best practices on skills that will interact with the web versus... [00:40:53] S1: I think this is more of, like, a bit of a survey or kind of a demo of stuff that I found that was kind of interesting. I think it was... It might have been out of... Was it like a Vercel? I'm trying to remember now. I'd have to look back at the the full, like, reading materials. But there was, like, one site that I found where I think they... Maybe it was... It might have been browser based, actually. They might have like done... Do you remember this? [00:41:12] S0: Yeah. Well, it would be them that had coined this thing. It's just that I was like, did I miss something? This was like a big part of No, the skills [00:41:19] S2: he's good. He's being educated. Yeah. [00:41:23] S1: I think they made some sort of... Because I guess they were... Yeah. I mean, browsers, obviously, like... They like browsers. They like browsers. And, but, they they had, like, a good, I think, website where they showed some of these interesting capabilities. [00:41:33] S2: Seems legit. CLI is a fun one. Do you have a lot of students, or this is their first time in a terminal in a CLI? Or is it kind of the norm now?
00:41:33 · S2, Mihail Eric, Shawn Wang
[00:41:33] S2: Seems legit. CLI is a fun one. Do you have a lot of students, or this is their first time in a terminal in a CLI? Or is it kind of the norm now? [00:41:41] S1: No. I don't think so. I think that given that most of them, again, last year, I would say that some of them had probably still remember the days of finger on keyboard typing. This is, Most, I think, students have interacted with Claude Code at this point. [00:41:57] S2: I'm curious the split of people that are now just using the apps, right? Claude Code also has a desktop app. So does Codex. Codex is primarily an app now. You're kind of not in the CLI, not in the terminal. It's a thing that puts off a lot of average people, but just random note. [00:42:17] S0: Yeah. I would say, you know, I think there's also another thing about skill. There are... That are bundles of skills where they they sort of cross reference each other. Yeah. [00:42:25] S1: Like the plugins. Right? [00:42:26] S0: Like the plugins. And then there's also, I guess, the art of writing a skill, which is a thing that I've also focused on very IE. Mhmm. Mhmm. I think a lot of these are focusing on skill consuming. Yep. And you have all these influencers like Matt Pocock and what have you. They're like, yeah. This skill will save you. It will solve all your problems. But, no, you should write your skills yourself. [00:42:46] S1: Right. [00:42:46] S0: And, actually, when you try to write them naively, they're usually bad. And, actually, it takes a little bit of skill to write a skill.
00:42:46 · Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric, S2
[00:42:46] S0: And, actually, when you try to write them naively, they're usually bad. And, actually, it takes a little bit of skill to write a skill. [00:42:55] S1: That's absolutely right. That's absolutely right. [00:42:56] S2: What are swyx's best tips on writing skills? [00:42:59] S0: I have a skill... I have a public skills repo. I went through definitely a phase of psychosis of, like, skill everything. [00:43:03] S2: No. No. Don't give us skills. How do you write good skills? [00:43:06] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So I have a skill for cutting skills. So I I I... Like, there... So every, like, Claude Code and Codex, they all have skill creation skills. Right? So then there's... I have a skill cutter skill that cuts it down because they... They're all... They... It just documents every way in which those default skills that are created are bad. So you always run this after any skill is created to cut it down. Right? So... Kinda like this. Yeah. It's really annoying because sometimes there is slop and, like... But there's good in the slop. And then you you have to, like, sort of whittle down what they're... What they're... [00:43:41] S1: Right. Right. Oh, interesting. As in you're saying, like, even the slop is it's still in the language of the agents. So the slop means something. It's like, yeah. Okay. Okay. Gotcha. Got it.
00:43:41 · Mihail Eric, S2, Shawn Wang
[00:43:41] S1: Right. Right. Oh, interesting. As in you're saying, like, even the slop is it's still in the language of the agents. So the slop means something. It's like, yeah. Okay. Okay. Gotcha. Got it. [00:43:49] S2: It's fun. Everyone has their own version. Use first, there's very easy to like vibe check a skill, right? You just call it, run it a few times. And distill these preferences into a skill that's like, this is what I like, this is he doesn't like. Mhmm. And it it adjusts over time and then, you know, [00:44:05] S0: it So gets the problem is that... Yeah. Yeah. You're calling it, but the the actual... The worst part is when a skill triggers when you're not expecting it to. Like, you wrote it one time to fix the thing, and then, like, now you're working on a completely different thing, and it triggers. Why? Because it's badly written because the trigger says, like, oh, you call me whenever blah blah blah happens. Totally. And you're like, okay. Read's good. And then you do a different project and triggers and you're like, oh, what [00:44:29] S2: the hell is happening? There's like a few people that are just like, okay, I have a bunch of skills and I keep adding on sometimes. I know some people like Eugene Yan, they are pretty particular about how many skills they have. They prune them. If not used, they clean them every few weeks. [00:44:45] S1: Yeah.