Perplexity Opens Up Its Skills Design Core
Perplexity open sources Skills design. Best practices for LLMs not code.
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Recently, there’s a must-read article: Perplexity has open-sourced their internal best practices for maintaining hundreds of Skills.
The biggest takeaway after reading it: The best practices for writing Skills are almost the complete opposite of the best practices for writing code.
Zen of Python vs Zen of Skills
The Perplexity team made a joke using PEP 20 — “The Zen of Python.” They created a comparison table showing that roughly half of the Python Zen principles should be completely reversed when writing Skills.
In one sentence: Writing a Skill is not writing software — it’s building context for the model. The constraints are completely different, and so are the design principles. If you approach writing Skills the way you write code, the result will be terrible.
I especially agree with the last one — if something can be explained clearly in a few words, the model can probably handle it on its own. Putting it in a Skill just wastes tokens.
