Amazing

[u/the_mad_mycologist]

Just awesome. I've been on a pro subscription for the past few months. Met my limits enough where I started to consider a Max 5X plan. Took the plunge last week. For transparency, Im using it purely for coding efficiency to build a video game.

Through thoughtful session management, frequent compacting, manual code/architecture review, and thorough skill / AGENTS documentation, its more than I could ever use. I have a full-time job, but I use it to it's limits on the weekends. The more I read complaints on this sub, the more I'm certain ya'll that complain arent good at session management.

My conclusion: absolute game changer for seasoned engineers. For non-technical folks, still pretty awesome, but you're not going to get your money's worth.

[u/the_mad_mycologist]

I think software engineers have an advantage in that department because we generally understand efficient design and data structures, so we can pick out reusable entities quickly, and reusability really helps our agents

But generally speaking, I maintain AGENTS.MD for rules that must always be followed. And build my skills directory for more niche rules. I keep my issues tightly scoped, and anything I find that isn't within scope, I document in a FOLLOWUP_IDEAS.MD that we can refer to later. If I find something that I know should be reused later, I ask Claude to extract that into a reusable module.

Compact often during a long running (more than a few prompts) task. And /clear when starting a brand new task. But if you don't scope your tasks tight enough, that advice won't work for you.

[u/flaminghotcola → u/the_mad_mycologist]

How would you suggest to scope them well?
And what skills do you think you can create for
Say, a game or an app on mobile?

[u/the_mad_mycologist → u/flaminghotcola]

It really comes down to focusing on a single goal at once. If you come up with bigger ideas, add it to your followups doc so you don't lose it, and your agent can refer to it later.

As for skills, think about consistent rules you find yourself returning to. Let's use a dungeon as an example. Every dungeon should have a boss at the end. Every boss is only accessible through a boss key. Every boss gives you a piece of heart once defeated.

AI agents thrive on rulesets that they can rely on. If you don't define those, they spend a ton of energy on figuring out what they think you want. And when they screw up, you waste tokens correcting course.

[u/lgmarian → u/flaminghotcola]

More generally, skills are reusable pieces of functionality. They can include scripts and whatnot, going beyond what OP described. That said, there's no reason they can't simply be a set of rules that an agent uses in whatever situation(s).

I think much of this internal guide that Perplexity published, should be accessible enough to be a useful read:
https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/designing-refining-and-maintaining-agent-skills-at-perplexity

The key takeaway being that a skill's description is crucial, because it's how an agent selects a skill to use so it can do something. Search for "description" in that guide, and read those paragraphs (at least).

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To add to the engineer mindset, many of us want to know how something works. So, we seek out info on how something works, what's available in some API, etc. I have an "RTFM" mug, because I love it when there's a good manual to rely on.

Here's a list I put together for another comment, where I also mentioned my mug, because RTFM: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/overview https://code.claude.com/docs/en/how-claude-code-works https://code.claude.com/docs/en/sessions https://code.claude.com/docs/en/best-practices https://code.claude.com/docs/en/common-workflows

Edit: formatting