Inspired by a lot of back-and-forth work with several different agents, as well as shaped by my own understanding of using context windows (and tokens) in as efficient a way as possible, the LLMs and myself have came up with a quite cool system heavily inspired by Anthropic's skills to dynamically extend an agent's capabilities. Based on how it works, the name "Lazy Skills" was the most logical one!

Read for my attempt to answer this question!

The thing is all these big labs are so “transformer-pilled”, and they need to keep the money furnaces growing that I think it’ll take considerably more than 10 years, more like 20-30 if we’re lucky.

I both agree and disagree with this post, but I might be misunderstanding it. Near the end, it states:

“Enjoy writing it, it doesn’t have to be nice or pretty if it’s for you. Have fun, try out that new runtime or language.”

It doesn’t have to be nice or pretty EVEN if it’s NOT for you. The value in prototyping has always been there and it’s been very concrete: to refine mental models, validate assumptions, uncover gaps in your own thinking (or your team’s), you name it.

Unfortunately it feels that the pendulum has swung in the completely opposite direction. There’s a lot of “theatre” in planning, writing endless tickets and refining them for WEEKS before actually starting to write code, in a way that’s actively harmful for building software. When you get stuck in planning mode you let wrong assumptions grow and get baked in into the design so the sunken cost keeps rising.

Simply have a BASIC and SHARED mental model of the end goal with your team and start prototyping. LLMs have made this RIDICULOUSLY CHEAP. But, the industry is still stuck in all the wrong ways.

I’ve been reading the comments here… idk which companies you all work at, but, at least in all places I’ve worked you’ll have 2/3 people who are REALLY GOOD. Then you’ll have like 3/4 people who can sort of “trail” after those. And then there’s “the rest”. I’ve seen “the rest” making informed and “well planned” decisions that are just terrible approaches to a given problem. An LLM can actually be a net positive versus this rest.