Agent Skills Should Be Deterministic Tools
RossPeili · reddit · 2026-07-17
The author argues against turning "agent skills" into flashy system prompts, stating that truly useful skills should be deterministically executable tool capabilities rather than human-facing brand messaging.
His recommendations include:
- Build deterministic skills instead of just piling on system instructions;
- Design for agents, not human psychology;
- Start with simple but high-frequency capabilities, such as: background remover, prompt compressor, token spend limiter.
The author emphasizes that these "simple or even dumb" skills might not create a compelling startup narrative, but they are far more practical for autonomous agents. The post draws an analogy to Web2: the tools with massive daily active users are often unpretentious ones like YouTube to MP3 or Remove BG, rather than grand projects that are hard to implement.
Related event: Community Discusses Best Practices for AI Agent Engineering(3 posts)→
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