Agent Skills: Making AI Coding Agents Follow Software Engineering Best Practices
By
Addy Osmani
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Summary
The article discusses how AI coding agents default to taking the shortest path to "done," skipping essential software engineering practices like specs, tests, reviews, and scope discipline. The author introduces "Agent Skills" as a framework to make these non-optional for AI agents, arguing that reliable software at scale requires these invisible but critical parts of engineering work.
Key quotes
· 3 pulledA senior engineer's job is mostly the parts that don't show up in the diff.
The default behaviour of any AI coding agent is to take the shortest path to 'done.'
Agent Skills is my attempt to make them not optional.
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