alt Hacker NewsI really don't think any of these SOTA labs are doing agentic engineering correctly. Skills are the universal language of all agent harnesses. If you abstract the taste and prescription out of the skills and into guidance docs, then leave the skills as basically just workflow scaffolding, you can build task-specific workflows that work with any harness like Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, etc. Technically, you only really need 2 skills, work and review, and with these you can build infinitely complex workflows including self-improving loops. I built this out and have been using it for months. It's been extremely nice. https://github.com/DanMcInerney/orchflows
Replies
How does your criticism relate to the specifics of what OP posted? https://github.com/google/ax/blob/main/docs/concepts.md#work... This says it has skill registries.
You really, really need different skills depending on the model.
If you are using Qwen 27B you need very prescriptive skills.
If you are using Astra you usually want very minimal skills (because it will follow them but be unnecessarily constrained in some contexts)
If you are using Fable then it depends - it will take the skills as general guidelines but ignore them a lot more than Astra does. Sometimes this is good, sometimes not at all.
The OP is not really a workflow manager, it’s a workspace manager that facilitates creating controlled environments where your skills can run. Everything you said is compatible with (and complementary of) the OP project.
With that said, I’ll somewhat disagree with you. I’ve been down the path you’re talking about and while it is incredibly flexible and powerful, it became too difficult to maintain, and too inconsistent between workflow runs, and a pretty hefty waste of tokens to use AI on things that could instead be handled by deterministic scripts. I ended up creating an orchestrator for myself that uses skills as the primary way to tell agents how to execute a step in a workflow, but also directly orchestrates running scripts and managing state in a deterministic way rather than leaving it all up to agents.