The title says it all, or does it?
You can increase the abilities of your Agent with skills. This allows them to perform actions without needing to rely on what they have been trained on or by spending time and resources going out to the Internet to ‘research.’
If you have no idea what I’m talking about:
Kris just announced some nice updates
I asked Claude what we had to look forward to –
I have more than one AI Agent, like for example, Cline.
The nice thing about this node package is that it offers the chance to install the Skills ONCE for MULTIPLE agents.
Cool, what else?
I know one co-worker who loves Roo Code, and I still have Windsurf laying around.
That’s an option, but also the default.
And how does it go?
This bit is important.
└ Done! Review skills before use; they run with full agent permissions.
We’re pulling things off the InnerWebs. Make sure you know and agree with the Skills before handing them over to your Agent(s).
Ok, let’s see if Cline can see them
Without reloading my VS Code Cline extension, I simply ask it – hey, do we have any skills available for Oracle tasks?
Sweet!
Ok, let’s take one of these new skills out for a test drive
I like this one, a lot.
Being sure to utlize our existing skills and our mcp server, Using my Raptor database connection, let’s increase the salary for our employees by 10% or $5000, whatever is the lesser amount.
And cline responds…it wants to connect to my DB which I approve, and then run a query to find the said ’employees,’ which I also approve.
And then it asks this –
This is because the skills has directed it when doing NL2SQL and DML work, not to do DELETE or UPDATES without a WHERE CLAUSE, at least not until the operator has confirmed that’s what they want.
By the way, don’t do this ‘for real’
Database changes should be done on private, throw away machines, scripted, tested, and automated. Never deployed to production directly, but by your normal change management processes and procedures.
But, how would the grok4-fast-reasoning LLM in Cline decide to implement this change?
UPDATE EMPLOYEES
SET SALARY = SALARY + LEAST(0.1 * SALARY, 5000)
I mean I think I know what that does, but let’s ask an ‘expert’ –
Don’t trust Agents, don’t trust Skills, and don’t trust your Agents to use the Skills
The first time I asked Cline to do this it ignored everything in the skill. I chided it, and said, hey! Dude! And then it did the whole, oh you are right, so sorry…
Use Plan mode. Review the plan. Ensure the Skills have been invoked and followed properly. Test in safe environments. Use your brain.
