Some of the most popular repositories on GitHub lately are collections of agent skills. Matt Pocock has one, Addy Osmani has one, and Garry Tan has packaged his entire product workflow as gstack. Repositories full of Markdown files telling agents what to do. It sounds almost too simple, and I’ve seen people laugh them off as pure hype. To me, they make total sense. We may even be underestimating the value of some of them (though gstack feels more like a fever dream).
Most professional processes already exist somewhere. They are spread across books, articles, frameworks and years of experience. The hard part is finding the useful pieces, combining them into a workflow and remembering to apply them at the right moment.
Skills are a shortcut through that work. Someone has already condensed the process into steps, tools and checks that an agent can follow while doing the task with you.
I recently found Compound Writing, which does this for writing. It includes skills for developing an idea, interviewing, outlining, drafting and editing. I can follow a solid writing process without first reading and combining all the material it was built from. I can still read the books. Now I can already put some of what they teach to work.
Experts can adapt these workflows based on their own experience. People new to a field get a useful starting point without having to assemble the process themselves.
Now I wonder what the equivalent looks like for design. Or research. Or all the other things I don’t know how to do properly yet. Maybe the useful product isn’t another agent, but a really good process to give one.