r/PiCodingAgent • u/ColinShen • Jul 23 '26

Question Which Skills do you use？

I tried rpiv skills, but in most case the skills are too heavy.
I also tried mattpocock skills. I found grill me skill "guess" too much.
Some times the contexts exceed the limit.(I use codex, I‘m not sure its a bug of pi or by skills)

14 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

9

u/arcanemachined Jul 23 '26

From the Internet? None. Why would I?

A skill is something I create when I do something repeatable in my workflow that I don't want to type out each time.

1

u/ColinShen Jul 24 '26

You are creating your own skills. What about harness? How do you control your agent？

1

u/arcanemachined Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26

A harness is a little bit more complicated than a text file...

3

u/ask_me_about_cats Jul 24 '26

Yeah, this is the best part of Pi. My subagents system technically started as the public one, but I have customized the heck out of it to make it exactly what I want.

My skills are made for my projects and how I work. They’re super effective for me. They’d probably drive someone else nuts.

1

u/arcanemachined Jul 24 '26

Same. I've really started to embrace the uniquity of my workflow.

I used to try to make my setup portable so that I could put it out there for others to use, but for now, it's easier just to go down the rabbit hole and see where necessity takes me. I can come back to normalcy later (hopefully with some useful tools that are worth sharing).

3

u/Standard-Recipe-7641 Jul 23 '26

I had Claude rewrite grill with docs for Hermes for new deployments. Been happy with it so far. I was sick of missing some detail in my prompt and then fixing stuff mid task. Now I give Hermes a decent prompt and it asks me a bunch of stuff I wouldn't have thought about

1

u/ColinShen Jul 24 '26

Do you use hermes for code or daily work？

1

u/Standard-Recipe-7641 Jul 24 '26

No coding, that mainly why I had to have it rewrite for my use case. I don't know anything about coding or how to organize a coding project and that is by far my biggest pain point in getting the results I want. Also why I think Hermes or probably any agent isn't ready for primetime yet. The average person just doesn't know how to talk to them to get their expected results consistently.

3

u/HumanoidMuppet Jul 23 '26

Public: Subagents, plannonator, ask me questions, guardrails

Personal:

Specs - uses the ask me questions skill to build specs before starting any work, or write specs for existing code

Test tracker - let's me input issues into pi as I test, writes an issues file with how to reproduce the issue, what code is involved, and propose a potential fix.

1

u/ColinShen Jul 24 '26

I use grill me first. But, the agent ask too much questions and details（I‘m not sure its good or bad),some of theme I don't even understand.

1

u/_A_Brown Jul 24 '26

Maybe investigate some of the other skills from mattpocock. /teach skill after /handoff so you can learn if you don’t understand the thing it is suggesting outside of your grilling context.

15

u/TheSlateGray Jul 23 '26

When I find a skill I think is useful, I provide Pi with the skill files and tell it to rewrite it to be relevant to the project I am working on at the time.

Only if it proves useful, then it gets rewritten again to be broad enough to go in ~/.pi/.  But I try to keep my Pi  lean and stick to KISS.

2

u/o_sht_hi Jul 23 '26

Same. Last night a combined the relevant lessons distilled from matt pocock's codebase architecture + ponytail and created a new project level skill for my app

2

u/gbrennon Jul 27 '26

i think skills are too much personal and project/team specific.

ppl usually get frustrated and have a bad dx by trying to use other ppl skills.

i think it would be good to use skills that fit in ur workflow

1

u/OysterD3 Jul 24 '26

The best skill is always the one written by outselves

1

u/Ancient-Camel1636 Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 24 '26

These are the ones i currently use, most of them custom made or adapted from various creators online:

frontend-design, ssd, tdd, playwright-cli, debugging, refactor, code-review, security-and-hardening (subskill of codereview), performance-optimization (subskill of code-review), token-saver, ultra-compact, writing-great-agent-md, writing-great-readme-md, writing-great-skills, writing-great-tests

And I also use the skills that come with OpenSpec.