Equipping agents for the real world with Agent Skills

ANTHROPIC.COM

Much of the recent advances in LLM capability has been due to reasoning combined with tool-calling. Reasoning allows a model to ‘think’ through a problem step-by-step, whereas tool-calling allows the model to access external resources and APIs, for example searching the web or querying your local database.

A year ago Anthropic launched Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard for tool-calling, an integration pattern for connecting LLMs to APIs. However, with the release of Skills, I think they may have made MCP somewhat redundant.

Skills are deceptively simple, a markdown file with instructions, examples and code snippets. Anthropic used this feature to add document creation capabilities to Claude recently. Here’s an example skills that added PDF rendering capability.

So how is this different to MCP? In simple terms, MCP defines and documents external APIs, which models can navigate and invoke. Whereas, Skills are more of a recipe, describing how a model should solve a specific task via multiple steps. Importantly they rely on the model having access to an execution environment, a significant dependency, but if you’ve used Claude Code, or similar, you’ll know just how much more powerful LLMs become when they can write and execute code and scripts.

The Programmer Identity Crisis

HOJBERG.XYZ

While I am interested in the AI tools and technologies that augment us, or take on tasks with autonomy. I am probably more interested in what this means for the software engineering profession, both from the perspective of the individual (i.e. developers, testers, designer) and how we work collectively as teams, with AI.

The author thinks of software development as more than just writing code, they consider it a craft. Some consider it science, some art, but I too would describe it as a craft.

I’ve seen a few people liken the transition to AI-driven development as being akin to the move from low-level (assembly) to high-level (e.g. fortran) languages. And here I agree with the author, this analogy is fundamentally flawed.

“I want to drive, immerse myself in craft, play in the orchestra, and solve complex puzzles. I want to remain a programmer, a craftsperson.”

While there is much I agree with here, there are times when I consider a programming a craft, and other times when it is just a tool - a means to an end. And as a result, I am much more open to the use of AI for writing software, you just have to be careful about when and where.

Regardless, a great post and very thought-provoking.

Rapid web app development with Devin - A Developer’s Perspective

SCOTTLOGIC.COM

There are numerous agentic tools for software development, tools that work autonomously, writing code, executing, testing and iterating towards a goal (the initial prompt). However, just over a year ago, Devin was one of the very first on the scene. Although it did have a rocky start, with claims that some of the initial product demo were faked!

This blog post puts Devin through its paces, taking a spreadsheet-based app (what business doesn’t have one of these), turning into a web-based application.

The author goes into detail about the practices that they found worked, and those that did not. Ultimately they were able to create a production-ready application in a matter of days.

I found this sentence quite notable:

“Rather than reviewing every line, I focused on architecture and key logic, ensuring design integrity and passing functional tests.”

There are parts of your application where you don’t need to review every line, but you need to exercise care and experience to understand where that is the case.

Claude Code vs Codex Sentiment Analysis

VERCEL.APP

The AI industry seems to run on ‘vibes’, so what better way to compare Claude Code and Codex? Reddit comment vibes!

This sit has analysed 600 Reddit comments from a few popular subreddits to identify sentiment towards these two tools. At the moment, Codex seems to be winning.