If you're building an internal agent platform, this frames skills as the unit of capability and gives you the operational scaffolding most skill tutorials skip: a minimal registry, evals to catch skills silently breaking on model updates, and thresholds for when to move from a flat list to embedding-based routing and formal ownership.
A talk by FactSet's Yogendra Miraje on treating 'skills' — short skill.md files with routing signals like name, description, and trigger words — as the core building block of agentic systems instead of traditional features.
It covers progressive disclosure, building a minimal skill registry, testing skills with evals since model updates can silently break them, and scaling governance (search/embeddings past ten skills, formal ownership and audits past a hundred).
Transcript
Since skills were open sourced, Yogendra Miraje's team at FactSet stopped thinking about shipping features and started thinking about shipping skills. A skill is a capability you hand the agent, and its heart is a short skill.md whose name and description are really routing signals: get them distinct and the agent triggers the right one, blur them and it fires the wrong skill or none at all. He walks through a minimal skill registry, progressive disclosure so the agent only loads what it needs, and trigger words, like asking for a PDF versus an HTML report, that decide which skill runs. The harder lessons show up at scale. Skills without evals drift, because a new model quietly stops obeying them, so he treats skills as contracts you test. Past ten skills you need search and embeddings to keep the library coherent; past a hundred you need real governance, admission, ownership, periodic audits, change management, and a human deciding whether a skill should exist at all. His close is that skills are the interface to your agentic products, and at enterprise scale governing them matters as much as writing them. Speaker info: - https://x.com/YogiNotTheBear - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mirajey/ - https://yogimiraje.com Timestamps: 0:00 - From blueprints to skills 1:46 - Building skill centric agents 2:52 - Skills in context at enterprise scale 3:46 - Skills as the new features 5:04 - Inside a skill: the skill.md 6:37 - A minimal skill registry 7:42 - Progressive disclosure 9:13 - Trigger words and routing 12:17 - Skills without evals drift 12:56 - Search and embeddings past ten skills 13:46 - Governance past a hundred skills 16:36 - Skills as the product interface
