Tooling

A year ago, in April 2025, “AI in your workflow” mostly meant a chat window in a browser tab and an autocomplete plugin in your editor. You typed, it suggested, you accepted or rejected. The interaction model was small. The blast radius was small. The verb was “ask”. In April 2026, the verb is “delegate”. That is the headline, and it is not subtle once you go looking for it. The tools you use day to day no longer wait for prompts. They run for minutes at a time, open files, edit them, run shells, spin up sub-agents, browse the web, and come back with a result that is either roughly right or visibly wrong. You are no longer in the loop on every keystroke. You are in the loop on the outcome. ...

Most of the tooling I have written about over the last year has been provider-specific. A particular model, a particular harness, a particular set of features. The thing I find interesting about agent skills is that they are not. A skill is a folder. Inside the folder is a SKILL.md file with some YAML frontmatter and some markdown instructions. That is the whole format. Anthropic shipped them in Claude Code, open-sourced the spec, and at this point you can drop the same folder into Cursor, the Gemini CLI, OpenAI Codex, OpenHands, Goose, VS Code, GitHub Copilot, and a couple of dozen other tools, and they all do roughly the same thing with it. ...