Agent Skills Are Run Books, Not Programs: A Warning Against Massive Prompts
psobot · x · 2026-08-03
Developer lopopolo shared core insights on designing Skills for AI agents, arguing that Skills are run books, not deterministic programs.
- Fundamental Difference: Skills should not be used to enforce deterministic execution. Instead, they are best used to guide the model in establishing the right theory of mind for a task, understanding what the environment offers, and leveraging its reasoning and creativity.
- Anti-Pattern Warning: The author criticizes the practice of using a 200k token Skill as a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept.
- Best Practices: If vast context is genuinely required, it should be shifted left into callable tools or a lazily interrogable document corpus, rather than bloating the prompt.
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