Greg Isenberg

So they have this general system prompt that guides the model on how to act, what to do, what not to do.

The system prompt is very important.

And then you have a lot of people have agent.md files or cloud.md files.

Now I'm just going to say off rip, 95% of people don't need this.

The reason being is, again, you have to assume that the models are already good, right?

Now, imagine I told you, Greg, every time we're about to shoot a podcast, Greg, you need a microphone.

You know you need a microphone, right?

You've done this plenty of times, right?

So if I'm building, like, let's say a website with cloud code, and I'm telling cloud code, this code base uses React, right?

I don't need to because it has the code base in context.

It can check the code, right?

So there is this disparity where a lot of people are putting a lot of onus on the harness and the context building.

And I'm low-key starting to strip things off.

Like I'm going super, super minimal because, again, not to sound like an anthropic or open AI shill.

Unfortunately, I have not been acquired.

None of them are paying me.

Yeah, what is the 5% of the time I should care about it?

Proprietary information that may be specific to your company or some methodology that is specific to you that has to be referenced in every single conversation.

Because the annoying part with an agent.md file is every time you go back and forth with the agent, it's added in the context, right?

right the cool thing about skills and i'm going to talk about skills in a second the way skills are designed the skills are used in a way that's called progressive disclosure meaning when you have a skill file the entire thing is an additive context it's just the title and the description so the agent has the title and description in the context and when you let's say you have a notion report skill right and you tell your agent hey i want you to create a notion report and