# skills

Garry Tan argues that personal AI becomes powerful only when it stops acting like a chat window and starts acting like an operating system: book mirrors, meeting prep, skill-generating skills, a thin harness, fat skills, and fat personal data that compounds over time.

Garry Tan's agent screwed up twice this week — both bugs had the same shape: deterministic work done in latent space. His fix is skillify: every failure becomes a SKILL.md + deterministic script + tests + evals + resolver trigger. Ten steps. The bug becomes structurally impossible to repeat.

Thariq from Anthropic shares what they've learned from running hundreds of Claude Code Skills internally: Skills are folders not just markdown files, they cluster into 9 categories, and the secret sauce is in the gotchas section, progressive disclosure, and writing descriptions for the model — not for humans.

How OpenClaw remembers things, learns new skills, and runs tasks on autopilot. From Embeddings to Cron Jobs — explained for Python developers.

Claude Code creator Boris Cherny posted a 12-tweet thread breaking down why engineers love Claude Code: extreme customizability — hooks, plugins, LSPs, MCPs, skills, custom agents, output styles, 37 settings, 84 env vars, all committable to git for team sharing.

OpenAI's Responses API now uses 'Skills' via the shell tool: reusable instruction bundles loaded by models as needed. Simon Willison found inline base64 skills in JSON requests neatest. Skills fill the 'missing middle layer' between system prompts and tools, preventing bloat.