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Skills

CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, Skills, Hooks and Subagents: A Field Guide to Steering AI Agents (Ep. 1022)

CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, Skills, Hooks and Subagents: A Field Guide to Steering AI Agents (Ep. 1022)

Episode 1022 dissects the crucial aspect of effectively steering AI agents by determining the optimal placement of instructions to ensure reliability and cost-efficiency. It explores seven distinct methods for instruction delivery, contrasting instructions as probabilities with hooks as guarantees, and highlights the industry-wide adoption of standards like `agents.md` and the importance of human-crafted guidance for superior agent performance.

MCPs for Observability Stacks

MCPs for Observability Stacks

Diana Todea, Head of Developer Relations at VictoriaMetrics, demonstrates how Model-Controller-Pair (MCP) servers enhance observability stacks for faster, smarter troubleshooting. She highlights the use of AI-driven anomaly detection, natural language querying, and customizable "skills" to investigate production issues, manage metrics, and generate alerts, showcasing practical applications with two interconnected MCP servers.

Full Workshop: Setting Yourself Up for Success —Jason Liu, OpenAI Codex

Full Workshop: Setting Yourself Up for Success —Jason Liu, OpenAI Codex

Jason Liu from OpenAI shares advanced strategies for using Codex to automate complex workflows and manage personal information. He introduces key concepts like "compaction," dictation for input, and "appshots" for contextual awareness. The talk covers bringing context into the system via plugins and a personal memory vault, working with AI through automations, goals, and interconnected threads, and taking actions out in the real world, emphasizing the transformative power of "Computer Use" for broad system control.

From Writing Code to Designing Systems: How the Developer Role is Changing — Chris Noring, Microsoft

From Writing Code to Designing Systems: How the Developer Role is Changing — Chris Noring, Microsoft

This talk introduces a paradigm shift in software development, moving developers from pure code producers to system designers and agent orchestrators. It details a new workflow leveraging GitHub Copilot CLI, custom Copilot agents, and explicit guardrails like `agents.md` and skills. The focus is on how to decompose complex problems, delegate implementation to AI, and encode architectural standards and constraints directly, enabling higher consistency, quality, and accelerated delivery through a "human-in-the-loop" delegation model.

Combine Skills and MCP to Close the Context Gap — Pedro Rodrigues, Supabase

Combine Skills and MCP to Close the Context Gap — Pedro Rodrigues, Supabase

Pedro Rodrigues from Supabase shares key lessons from building an agent skill to work with Postgres and Supabase. He explains why critical security rules must go in the main skill file, the importance of pointing to living documentation, and how providing opinionated workflow guidance closes the reliability gap for agents in production systems.