I spent some time taking best practices from the past two years developing my projects with agent skills and centralized them in a repo so I can reuse them and standardize my projects. In the process of doing that, I realized that skills exist in different scopes and timelines, so I spent some time trying to figure out how to organize skills usefully. I realized that Magic The Gathering abilities have a lot of parallels to agent skills, so I did some experiments separating skills into three categories that MTG uses: activated, static, and triggered. I found this works very well for communicating to agents considerable context about the skill scope with minimal verbosity. If you're not familiar with MTG abilities, firstly MTG is a complex card game, and secondly each card in the game has some text at the bottom which amounts to a special coding language. The coding language's main block is called an ability, which represents some effect in the game. Abilities are separated into several types which set the scope and timing of the effect. These ability types are directly transferable to skills: Activated Skills: These are skills the agent must choose to use, and are a set of procedures that should be performed in order once Static Skills (called "passive" in my repo): These are skills which set general rules that should be applied all the time given the agent is working in a particular domain. Triggered Skills: These are skills which are like activated skills, but they should always happen any time a skill-defined event occurs. The event can be anything: something the agent does or an external event like a time passing. Separating the skill into these categories lets the agent have some preconceived ideas about how the skill should be used, which increases reliability and decreases context redundancy. I thought this was an interesting notion and just wanted to share. If you check out my skill repo, it has some other good ideas I've collected over time like a hermes-inspired skill self improvement system, test process organization, and documentation style/methodology. If you have any ideas about making it better, let me know.   submitted by   /u/1ncehost [link]   [comments]