Skills

TL;DR: If you’re using Codex, use a command to control the session or application, and use a skill to teach the agent a way of working. In Claude Code, the current documentation already treats skills as something you can invoke with /skill-name, so the concepts merge more there. Not so in Codex: types might exist as a skill, but /types won’t exist by default. There’s a common confusion when switching from Claude Code to Codex. And it’s understandable. ...

TL;DR: My AI agent had a 246-line instruction file for managing issues in Linear. 150 of those lines were workarounds: hardcoded UUIDs, curl fallbacks, notes like “the CLI doesn’t support X.” I didn’t rewrite them — I built a tool that made them unnecessary. Now those 150 lines are gone. Have you ever written a set of instructions so long that its sheer length proves something is fundamentally wrong? I’m not talking about legitimate documentation. I mean those files that start with “use tool X” and then spend 80% of the text explaining when tool X doesn’t work and what to do instead. Instructions that are, effectively, a list of apologies for the tool you should have built in the first place. ...

The Layoff He Didn’t See Coming A 38-year-old senior developer. Eight years at the company. Clean code, best practices, zero production incidents. In his last performance review, his output was 40% lower than colleagues with half his experience. The difference: they used Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code. He kept writing every line by hand, convinced that “AI tools generate mediocre code.” He wasn’t fired for writing bad code. He was fired for writing good code too slowly. ...