Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
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.
00:44:45 · Mihail Eric, Shawn Wang, S2
[00:44:45] S1: Yeah. [00:44:46] S0: Yes. So, yeah, this is like a huge problem if you're sort of in that skills world. I think this is actually why I suspect there are good... There are very smart people at OpenAI and and Anthropic that want skills to die, which is not a popular statement. No. Now they they won't say this publicly, but it just feels sloppy. This feels sloppy. I I know it's... Yeah. I I can see my own skills people being sloppy. It doesn't feel AI peeled. [00:45:14] S1: Right. Right? [00:45:14] S0: Yeah. Yeah. It's it's not it's not what AGI was supposed to look like, which is... It's like everyone having a giant bunch of markdown files. [00:45:21] S2: I mean, I [00:45:21] S1: think part of it is like There's a gardening problem, yeah, in some sense. [00:45:25] S2: A lot of people actually don't look at their markdown files, right? Like the UX of it, of just chatting what you want, creating a skill in chat, using it, seeing output. There's a of value you can get without ever looking at your markdown. Don't over complicate it at some level for yourself. You can get a lot of value. If you do stuff repeatedly, just be like, look at the last five times we did this, make me a skill, and you can iterate it with chat. There's a good side of it as well, right?