Skills are software

Oct 6

I built a tool for my agent that collects what I work on during the day and shows it back when I ask. It started as an app and ended up as a small set of components the agent assembles into an interface on the spot. That made me ask whether skills are the new software.

The Workin' demo. A day of work, laid out as threads and rich embeds.

Why bother remembering?

Every Friday the Vercel design team posts images and videos of the week's work into one thread. Workin' summarizes my week and pulls up the best attachments, so filling that thread takes a few copies and pastes. It also rescues side projects I'd otherwise forget by morning, and it can sum up a whole quarter in a few messages.

The atoms of work

My work lives in Slack messages, pull requests, calendar events and Notion docs. Yours might be call transcripts or CRM activity. The aim is the smallest piece of each moment that still lets you recall it. Workin' caches those pieces locally and refreshes them through the day, so the agent never has to fetch everything again.

The signal

The full picture is noisy, so each moment needs a sense of how much it matters. Engagement covers Slack messages and tweets. For quieter moments, like the last pull request of a project, the agent learns from a bit of coaching.

Adjusting the view

Since the agent holds the individual moments, it can reshape the view. I read the week in detail, note the themes, then ask for a short summary framed around them. I can also ask for one project, or for moments with one coworker before a peer review.

Why present it like iMessage?

Most of us already know that interface by heart. Threads and rich embeds are the two patterns I wanted from it.

Threads

One piece of work spreads across channels, PRs and reviews. A thread keeps those moments on one timeline, with the latest update at the bottom, the original context on top, and a count of the updates that followed.

Rich embeds

A moment is easier to recall in its original shape than in a summary. Workin' redraws Slack messages, pull requests and tweets in tidy form, which is where it goes beyond iMessage. I'm just giving my agent things to reply with besides text.

Before and after of a skill announcement — An important moment shown in its original form, so it is easier to remember.

The tweet that sums up the idea: view it on X.

A skill, not an app

Version one was a skill called /this-week that wrote a Markdown file. Version two was a local app. Then I started wiring up model choice and token budgets and asked what I was doing. I wanted my agent to use the thing. The app only ever had two parts: guidance and UI. Skills already carry guidance, so they can carry UI too.

Inversion of ownership

Software used to start with no context about the user. Now the agent has that context, and the skill supplies guidance and components for it to render. Agent friendliness and taste become the edge, and a company's main interface may end up being the components agents draw for it.

Full post: jm.sv/skills-are-software