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Comment by khimaros | Hacker News Reader

i built something with a similar philosophy here: https://github.com/khimaros/airun -- it is intended to be piped and redirected. it discovers skills, AGENTS and prompt templates from Claude Code, Pi.dev, OpenCode and others. no TUI, but does have a basic tool calling loop

$ airun -q -p 'output a shell command for linux to display the current time. output only the command with no other code fencing or prose' | airun -q -s 'review the provided shell command, determine if it is safe, run it only if it is safe, and then summarize the output from the command' --permissions-allow='bash:date *'

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While I think that the core philosohpy is the same, i'd like to ask: why adding features like Skills and prompt templates?

I personally decided to not implement Skills and instead using a prompt library approach, where certain .md are used to fully replace the system prompt, in order to allow for an approach similar to Skills with ~100 LoC dedicated to this system.

Aren't skills fairly easy to share, and can contain more than one file?

Prompts as well... he might be on to something here, can't say as I didn't try it yet

Skills are just prompts

Most of mine have code in them. That's most of the value.

Skills are not just prompts.. the entire problem that skills solve is runtime discoverability via a skill description. Agents can self-recognize that a skill would be useful in a situation, and then load+use.

Prompts are just text templates entered by the user, and the user must specifically know when to and remember to invoke them. If you’re just using skills as if they are the same as prompts, you’re totally missing out on the entire benefit that skills provide!

Skills are _like_ prompts, yes, they're extra info added to the context. A prompt is just a prompt though, an agent like Claude could use multiple skills in one go, which seems impossible to do with Zerostack.

Isn't the key thing with skills that the description is used to match them from a prompt that doesn't mention them?

Would a prompt library do that too?

i wanted airun to be drop-in useful in existing Claude/OpenCode/etc projects and skills are common.

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