Skills Are Overhyped. I Converted Vercel's Into Cursor Rules and Got Real Performance Wins

Skills are having a moment. Vercel launched skills.sh , a curated directory where teams can publish reusable skill packages for AI coding agents. The idea is compelling: instead of re-explaining your stack to the AI every time, you install a skill and it knows the context. Vercel published two skills of their own that caught my attention: react-best-practices performance patterns and rendering optimizations composition-patterns component architecture, compound components, context usage I read through both. The content is solid. But then I asked myself: do I actually need skills for this, or are Cursor rules a better fit? Skills vs. Rules: Why I Chose Rules When I read through the Vercel skill packages, I noticed something: the content isn't really capabilities , it's conventions , rules about when to use useMemo , how to avoid async waterfalls, why you should prefer useRef over useState for non-rendered values. That's not what skills were designed for. That's what rules are. Here's why