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Comment by gidellav | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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

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.

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!

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

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