I wish all of the tooling vendors would support MCP prompts because that would solve this problem and provide a very good way of delivering aggregate feeds of skills -- dynamically, even.
Codex, for example, currently does not support this[0].
Then we can just point to an MCP server and have the MCP server dynamically compose the set of skills without needing to do any syncs, git sub-modules, etc.
Yes, I agree that MCP-based prompt/skill delivery would be a very interesting direction.
If tooling vendors broadly supported MCP prompts, an MCP server could become a dynamic distribution layer for team-managed skills, which would remove a lot of sync-oriented workflow.
My current assumption is that we still need something Git-native today because:
- skills are mostly authored and reviewed in Git
- teams need provenance and governance around them
- tool support for MCP prompt delivery is still incomplete
So I see Harbor more as a practical system for the current ecosystem, not necessarily the final shape.
Also worth pushing for a more standardized skills command for CLIs, similar to —help, but for (agent/human) workflows, https://cliwatch.com/blog/designing-a-cli-skills-protocol (if you ship these with your CLI, you also get versioning out of the box so to say)
I think TanStack Intent is quite close to that direction.
Packaging skills with libraries/CLIs and letting agents discover them from installed packages makes a lot of sense. I see Harbor as addressing a different layer on top
of that: organizational collection, cataloging, provenance, governance, and safety.
Why stop at skills though? If you are trying to solve the provisioning problem for agent tools, shouldn't that also include MCP, commands, hooks, rules, etc in addition to skills?
Scripts are just text; skills are just text. Scripts can be inlined with the skill. Agent can create its own temp dir and extract the script to run.
Don't overthink it; it's all just text. I want to serve the text from HTTP instead of having to deploy via `git` and sync. I want to be able to dynamically generate that text on the server based on the identity of the user, their role, what team they're in, what repo they're working on.
I don't want static skills. That users have to remember to sync and keep up to date.
I could be wrong, but I don't think there is anything in the skills spec that prohibits a skill from having binaries? A skill may even choose to embed them to be able to run in sandboxed environments.
Agreed on skills not being static. Of course, with the way the internet works, I don't want them to be too dynamic either :)
I've been using C# since the first release in 2003/4 timeline?
Aside from a few high profile language features like LINQ, generics, `async/await`, the syntax has grown, but the key additions have made the language simpler to use and more terse. Tuples and destructuring for example. Spread operators for collections. Switch expressions and pattern matching. These are mostly syntactic affordances.
You don't have to use any of them; you can write C# exactly as you wrote it in 2003...if you want to. But I'm not sure why one would forgo the improved terseness of modern C#.
Next big language addition will be discriminated unions and even that is really "opt-in" if you want to use it.
The C# impl is still early and I think what will end up happening is that a lot of the boilerplate will end up being owned by source generators in the long term. C# team has a habit of "make it work, make it better". Whatever v1 gets released is some base capability that v2+ will end up making more terse. I'm happy and OK with that; I'd rather have ugly unions than no unions (yes, I already use OneOf)
Ah Source Generators, after all these years still badly documented, when searching you most likely will find the original implemenation meanwhile deprecated, have poor tooling with string concatenation, and only have a few great blog posts from .NET MVPs to rely on.
:shrug: we're using them very effectively and there are plenty of resources at this point.
Very useful for reducing boilerplate and we can do some interesting things with it. One use case: we generate strongly typed "LLM command" classes from prompt strings.
There are plenty of resources, outside Microsoft Learn that is, and the content is mostly understandable by those of us that have either watched conference talks, or podcasts on the matter.
Now having someone diving today into incremental code generators, with the best practices not to slow down Visual Studio during editing, that is a different matter.
They are naturally useful, as a user, as a provider, Microsoft could certainly improve the experience.
> So, let’s ask again, why? Why is this jump concentrated in software about AI?...Money and hype
The AI field right now is drowning in hype and jumping from one fad to another.
Don't get me wrong: there are real productivity gains to be had, but the reality is that building small one-offs and personal tools is not the same thing as building, operationalizing, and maintaining a large system used by paying customers and performing critical business transactions.
A lot of devs are surrendering their critical thinking facilities to coding agents now. This is part of why the hype has to exist: to convince devs, teams, and leaders that they are "falling behind". Hand over more of your attention (and $$$) to the model providers, create the dependency, shut off your critical thinking, and the loop manifests itself.
The providers are no different from doctors pushing OxyContin in this sense; make teams dependent on the product. The more they use the product, the more they build a dependency. Junior and mid-career devs have their growth curves fully stunted and become entirely reliant on the LLM to even perform basic functions. Leaders believe the hype and lay off teams and replace them with agents, mistaking speed for velocity. The more slop a team codes with AI, the more they become reliant on AI to maintain the codebase because now no one understands it. What do you do now? Double down; more AI! Of course, the answer is an AI code reviewer!. Nothing that more tokens can't solve.
I work with a team that is heavily, heavily using AI and I'm building much of the supporting infrastructure to make this work. But what's clear is that while there are productivity gains to be had, a lot of it is also just hype to keep the $$$ flowing.
People will dismiss this critical-thinking shutoff loop as doomer conspiracy, but it's literally the strategy that ai founders describe in interviews. Also people somehow can't or don't remember that uber was almost free when it came out and the press ran endless articles about the "end of car ownership", but replacing your car with uber today would be 10x more expensive. Ai companies are in a mad dash to kill the software industry so that they can "commoditize intelligence". There will be thousands of dead software startups that pile slop on slop until they run out of vc funny-money.
I have some old Wordpress sites around as well as sites hosted in Firebase and GitHub. I'd recommend the latter two because Wordpress is a bit of a pain to maintain on an ongoing basis. It has a relatively large attack area and over the two decades I've operated it, I've had multiple times that malware made its way in via various channels.
I'd move my WP sites, but I'm also too lazy to convert everything over to Astro (one day, I'll tackle this with an agent).
We use GH and are investing more in the platform features.
Codespaces specifically is quite good for agent heavy teams. Launch a full stack runtime for PRs that are agent owned.
> keep hearing that Github is terrible
I do not doubt people are having issues and I'm sure there have been outages and problems, but none that have affected my work for weeks.
GH is many things to many teams and my sense is that some parts of it are currently less stable than others. But the overall package is still quite good and delivers a lot of value, IMO.
There is a bit of an echo chamber effect with GH to some degree.
It's one thing to use AI to touch up photos, but in the end, you probably still want photos that match your memories and good photography still has an element of taste and creativity.
Codex, for example, currently does not support this[0].
Then we can just point to an MCP server and have the MCP server dynamically compose the set of skills without needing to do any syncs, git sub-modules, etc.
[0] https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/5059