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If you build with AI agents: is packaging knowledge into reusable skills a real pain, or am I imagining it?

2 months ago

I've been building with AI agents for a while, and the thing that keeps biting me isn't the model — it's that every agent is only as good as the knowledge you hand it. I keep finding myself copying a doc into a chat, reformatting it into steps, adding a "when should you use this," writing a little done-checklist, and then doing that same dance over and over for every new workflow. It's the boring 20 minutes nobody talks about, and it feels like the reason most people's agents stay generic.

Before I build anything heavier around this, I want to sanity-check whether the pain is actually real for other people or just my own workflow being messy.

So, if you build with agents: how are you handling reusable knowledge today — hand-writing skill files, ignoring it entirely, or using some tool I don't know about? How much time does it actually eat? And if something could turn a raw doc or SOP into a clean, structured, agent-ready skill in a few seconds, would you trust auto-generated output enough to run it, or would that always need a human pass first?

Genuinely trying to figure out if this is a problem worth solving. Tear it apart.

Comments (2)

sanqi2 months ago

You're not imagining it, but "it bugs me" and "enough people pay to make it a product" are different bars, and the gap is where a lot of agent tooling dies.

Cheapest check before you build: go where agent builders vent, LangChain/LlamaIndex GitHub issues, r/LocalLLaMA, the framework Discords; and count how many describe the exact ritual you just did (copy a doc in, reformat into steps, add "when to use this").

If the same hand-rolled workaround keeps showing up from different people, the pain is real and structural, not just your setup.

If it's mostly you, it's probably a workflow tweak, not a product. Repetition across different builders is the signal I'd trust over my own frustration.

Emma Tcherkezian2 months ago

I'll be honest with you. Creating and packaging an agent is never a difficult task. However, there is only one reason why it seems difficult. The company is the same because there's no architecture. If there is no organizational chart, no social skills, and no reward or punishment regulations, then it's not a company. Club. It's the same. Agents must also have discipline, regulations, constraints, something to handle, and a network that can codify the connection between their memory and skills. That's called architecture. I might seem unlucky, but if you ask Claude or CODEX to create an agent, the O architecture won't be created. Because they need to promote the use of their agent swarms and workflows, especially agent parallel agents from Fable, to make money. If they could easily create an architecture so that everyone could run their agents on their own local models, they wouldn't be able to make money. Try using the tool I created. Sincerely, I can no longer tolerate the tyranny of such enterprise-level language models,