Skills are new linters

Reddit r/AI_Agents Tools

Summary

The author argues that using AI skills to automate code quality checks replicates the same memory and reliability issues that linters were originally designed to solve, questioning the effectiveness of LLM-based skills as replacements.

I heard the subj at an AI meetup and got surprised that everyone seemed to agree with it. Some personal context: I've been automating many things and have built tools to help other developers to automate things. I did it not because I love automation, but because I never relied on my memory. Some things get blurred before they got to muscle memory, other things are very counterintuitive, and I always had to double check with docs, plus many other reasons. Linters (more generally all possible automated checks) are one of those tools to offload memory: no need to remember what we agreed to follow. What helped even more was moving all checks to CI, so you don't need to remember to run locally and ask everyone else to do the same. And everyone can see the CI logs to understand why something slipped through. It always worked well, until people started using skills instead. And funny how LLMs repeat similar memory issues we originally tried to fix with linters. LLM can forget rules because memory gets overwritten with more recent context. Its focus can drift, and it won't apply a skill when needed. And ofc there is no such thing as logs to review and improve it. So my question is: how many of you automate code quality (formatting, linter, automated tests, security checks, etc) via AI skills? What am I missing here?
Original Article

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