Done🫡
📄 Skills in Agent Harnesses
A lot of people don't know this (I didn't until recently) but most agent harnesses will load the description of your skill upon starting up your harness. This is how Claude Code works.
What people don't usually know is that even when you explicitly call a skill to be used inside of a harness, or the AI figures out to use a skill, it usually only does a read of the first 150 lines of the skill (to understand how to use it or if it applies to the work it's trying to do).
It's really important to outline a table in the first 150 lines of the mandatory parts of the skill that must be run when you invoke the skill.
If you make some type of mandatory instruction after 150 lines, it might get missed entirely. If you describe in prompting that you want to use a provided Python script or template, it also might be out of bounds of that 150 lines and never get called correctly.
If you write a table of contents of the skill actions in the first 150 lines and mark which ones are mandatory (or that, if the user has called the skill, you must read the whole skill context and all references), you get more reliable skills. We use markdown checklists for this now.
It's worked ...
Opus 5: Less work, more talk.
Opus 4.8: Half work, half talk.
Opus 4.6: More work, less talk.
Opus 4.6 — the ghost of Mythos. 👻
#BugBounty #InfoSec