Full Walkthrough: Writing & Using Skills — Nick Nisi and Zack Proser

This talk explores how to effectively guide AI agents when they interact with complex products like Superbase. It argues that while agents are capable of many tasks, they require specific guidance to handle novel situations, security protocols, and optimized workflows. The presentation introduces the concept of "skills" as a method to provide this guidance, demonstrating how they improve agent performance and safety, particularly when integrated with tool-calling capabilities.

This talk explores how to improve AI agent performance by reducing complexity and focusing on verifiable outcomes. The speaker advocates for enforcing actions through structured pipelines rather than relying on agent instructions alone. By minimizing unnecessary agent skills and implementing robust verification mechanisms, developers can achieve better results and reduce errors. The core idea is to shift from trusting agents to demanding proof of their work.

This talk details how Cursor refactored a complex feature, originally spanning 12,000 lines of code, into a concise 200-line skill. This transformation leveraged existing primitives like agent skills and sub-agents, primarily using markdown to redefine functionality. The refactoring aimed to reduce maintenance overhead and improve user experience for advanced features.

This talk explores the burgeoning open-source AI agent ecosystem, emphasizing the accessibility and power of open models and tools. It highlights how advancements in Hugging Face's platform, including the Hub, Traces, Skills, and MCP tools, are democratizing the development and deployment of sophisticated AI agents. The core thesis is that open-source AI is rapidly catching up to and even surpassing closed-source alternatives, offering greater control, privacy, and customization for developers.

This talk explores how to improve AI agent performance through the use of skills, which are essentially structured folders containing instructions and files for running workflows or providing custom information. The speaker, Pedro Rodrigues from Supabase, details the process of creating, testing, and automating the evaluation of these skills, emphasizing their role in enhancing agent capabilities within products like Supabase. The core idea is to leverage skills for progressive disclosure, allowing agents to access information only when needed, thereby optimizing context window usage.