Skills are the newest hype commodity in the world of agentic AI. Skills are text files that optionally get stapled onto the context window by the agent. You can have skills like “frontend design” or “design tokens” and if the LLM “thinks” it needs more context about that topic, it can import the contents of those files into the context to help generate a response.

Dave Rupert

AI 'skills' — text files optionally injected into an agent's context window — are compared to magic numbers in programming: workarounds with unpredictable results and no reliable way to measure effectiveness. The non-deterministic nature of LLMs means the same skill can produce wildly different outputs, making quality consistency difficult. Questions around minimum viable context, token costs, and context rot remain unanswered. The author expresses skepticism about the broader churn of AI tooling trends (skills, MCP, PRDs, prompt engineering) and anticipates greater scrutiny once AI subsidies end and users bear the full cost of hallucinations.

Magic Words