Ask HN: What's the best place to learn about skills and AI for coding in general
4•rrmdp•4h ago
Comments
TomEleff•3h ago
Install a coding agent CLI and ask "How can I use {this tool} for coding? What are skills? Can you make one and show me how to use it? Where can I find skills from communities on GitHub?"
Even better is to also tell the agent why, e.g. "I am used to coding in my IDE with auto-completion and Copilot chat, copying and pasting code snippets and testing via scripts. I see a lot of people talking about skills but don't know why they are useful or how to use them."
I try a lot of coding tools... The first thing I do is ask what the tool can do for me, and how it's going to be better than my process without the tool. If the agent can't articulate an answer, that's usually a sign the tool isn't right for me yet.
rrmdp•3h ago
Nice, I didn't think of this, yeah, I think it's a good idea but I'm looking something else, kinda a website, or community with folks sharing their experiences.
OpenAI, anthropic, lots of companies building coding agent tools, also share skills publicly.
Skills can feel like a big productivity boost at first, but it's good to remember lots of times they represent the ways that a specific person works. That way of working may not always be right for you, or, it might hide how the work is actually being done. Good to always try out the general purpose tool as-is, looking for skills that help you repeat tasks without rewriting prompts, or help save tokens, or help your agent use tools that it may not know how to use already.
TomEleff•3h ago
Even better is to also tell the agent why, e.g. "I am used to coding in my IDE with auto-completion and Copilot chat, copying and pasting code snippets and testing via scripts. I see a lot of people talking about skills but don't know why they are useful or how to use them."
I try a lot of coding tools... The first thing I do is ask what the tool can do for me, and how it's going to be better than my process without the tool. If the agent can't articulate an answer, that's usually a sign the tool isn't right for me yet.
rrmdp•3h ago
TomEleff•3h ago
OpenAI, anthropic, lots of companies building coding agent tools, also share skills publicly.
Skills can feel like a big productivity boost at first, but it's good to remember lots of times they represent the ways that a specific person works. That way of working may not always be right for you, or, it might hide how the work is actually being done. Good to always try out the general purpose tool as-is, looking for skills that help you repeat tasks without rewriting prompts, or help save tokens, or help your agent use tools that it may not know how to use already.
rrmdp•2h ago