Stop Putting Best Practices in Skills

Vercel demonstrated that AGENTS.md outperforms skills in their agent evals. AGENTS.md hit 100% pass rate on general framework knowledge. Skills with explicit instructions reached 79%. In 56% of cases, the agent had access to a skill but never invoked it. Their conclusion: skills work for vertical, action-specific workflows, not for general best practices. Their evals were single-shot, though. One prompt, one response, done. Skills depend on context to be called. The model sees a name and a one-line description and has to decide in a single cold shot whether to invoke. In a real session, you go back and forth, context accumulates, the model picks up patterns. Single-shot penalizes skills by testing them in conditions nobody actually uses them in. Then there’s Superpowers . People install it, and Claude Code starts following TDD, writing plans before coding, and debugging systematically. It bundles best practices as skills and people swear by it. If skills are supposed to lose to AGENTS.