HN Explorer

Show HN: Craigslist for agent skills, curated by a human (skillbay.sh)

1 points by skeptrune ↗ HN
hey, i'm nick (@skeptrune on X). i have been using ai for a lot of things i'm not an expert in and thought it would be nice to try and buy paid skills for helping it accomplish those tasks more efficiently.

for example, redlining contracts, creating ai generated videos, different website designs, and more.

curious to see if this resonates with folks here. i figure a more engineering'y audience that's ai coding-agent forward would have similar problems to what inspired me to make this

18 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 67.6 ms ] thread
kouteiheika
> buy paid skills [..] curious to see if this resonates with folks here

Probably not.

I'm going to be a little bit reductive, but: why would I buy a markdown file that someone most likely got an LLM to generate while I can just simply get my own LLM to generate a similar one for me for free?

guywithahat
Presumably, like all things, skills will just become increasingly complex until generating them requires architectural understanding. Also I’m sure there are sufficiently nontechnical people who would be happy to pay $5 for something that just works.

That said, I do think it’s hard to see myself paying for skills. It feels like something that lends itself to OSS

yencabulator
Meanwhile, the AI labs are saying with the models getting smarter skills etc should be less verbose and just let the model do the thinking.
Arubis
Yeah, HN isn't going to be your target market by and large -- this is the home of the folks that would, at most, pull up a page describing a skill and dump it into a harness.

I wouldn't take that as fatal. Most people aren't HN people.

gpugreg
I thought the same when someone promoted their platform for selling image prompts here on HN, but now they have at least 100k sales. I guess there will always be someone willing to pay for something if it takes even the slightest bit of effort.
babelfish
Are there intentionally zero skills listed/curated?
skeptrune
I have a backlog of 20 or so to review right now and am getting that out as fast as I can.
aliasxneo
I feel like skills are going to succumb to influencer branding. People will use the ones their idol says to use.
Arubis
Agreed here, though this product/marketplace may be able to be a landing site for precisely that.
jpease
Why not ask the AI to research the topic you’re interested in and draft the skill(s) for you?
skeptrune
they're usually pretty bad. a lot of domain specific information just isn't public
holoduke
Sorry to say that this probably has no valuable moat. And that is becoming an increasingly bigger issue for many companies. There is no longer the need for many services and products. There is some serious demand for expertise in the field of AI automation. But it requires experts with domain knowledge. Almost no companies have this. The end is near for those.
radlad
I had a similar idea but as a marketplace for agents to purchase from. Many AI tasks involve building a pipeline as step 1. If everyone is building the same pipelines, why not offer them as a service? If it's cheaper per token, and maybe higher quality...

I then started wondering how agents could submit benchmarks and request bids in a verifiable manner.

Rickado55
AI is already useful across so many tasks but having specialized skills that make it better at specific workflows could be a huge productivity boost.