>but with good repos and good prompts
I think waaay more people struggle with this than HN would have you believe. In the real world, not everyone is a software dev with a developer mindset to using these tools. Normal people essentially type the equivalent of "Make me X!" and complain when the model assumes anything in their underspecified mess of a prompt. There are skills like grill-me that can potentially help these people a lot, but in the end I believe models will just be smart enough to understand your level of knowledge and intent to do this stuff on their own. They are getting much better on pushing back on poor user input already. The problem is that when they double down on hallucinations (very rare nowadays but I still see it happen in enterprise projects with the latest models). So you kind of need to know when to push back on the model as well. But for that you have to be really good at the subject.
[dead]
I tend to agree. Skill files become less useful as developer skill increases.
As a skilled developer my repetitive instructions are mostly one or two sentence phrases for staring something like a highly-interactive planning session, or a self-supervised implementation session with my preferred setup of implementation and review subagents. I can specify those out by hand, or save a couple keystrokes with a tiny skill file.
But if you are not a software dev you might lack the vocabulary to tell the agent what you want. If you don't know what tenant isolation is, chances are your app will have a broken security model because you can't ask for it, and probably won't think to ask the agent for a security review either. Skills can mitigate a lot here