tanteMar 12
One of the weirder things in "AI" is the whole "skills" thing. It sounds as if those were somehow little programs or tools integrated into your agents but they are just markdown files with strings that you pull into your prompt to hope the slop machine does better. Crazy shit.
Show threadGlyphMar 13

@tante I know very little about LLMs and even less about product architecture at these companies but that has not stopped me from making devastatingly accurate predictions about a bunch of things, so here's my guess:

the major challenge of current models is context rot, which is obvious and catastrophic when applying them to any real-world problems. "skills" are one of a set of tools to play a little shell game to shorten the prompt by hiding the prompt until heuristics determine it's needed

Show threadGlyphMar 13
@tante my prediction is that like all prompt-shortening techniques, "skills" will rapidly scale up as the LLM enthusiast community heavily leverages them, starts reselling them to each other, builds up a bunch of infrastructure to make them bigger and bigger, and eventually skills will balloon to the point where loading one immediately blows out your context, making it worthless
Show threadGlyphMar 13
@tante my prediction following that is that we will start to see "skill trees" that break things down even further into a hierarchy, and then a bunch of blog posts telling you how to craft your external prompt to glob up everything in the tree so the model really knows what it's doing, and then that "best practice" will start making the prompt too long too
Show threadGlyphMar 13
@tante god I hope I'm wrong about this, most days right now I would just like to be wrong more often
Show threadtanteMar 13
@glyph I feel that deeply in my bones.
Show threadPseudo Nym

@tante @glyph

I call the first meeting of The Kassandra Club to order.

The first rule of Kassandra Club is you can talk about it all you want, but nobody will believe you.

Mar 17 at 2:56pmWeb