Rhythm X Zhihu Hong Kong Event Recruitment Skills, register now for a chance to showcase live.

Original title: Rhythm X Zhihu Hong Kong event recruitment skills, register now, and you may get a chance to demo on-site

Original author: RhythmBlockBeats

Original source:

Repost: Mars Finance

Six months ago, “how to write good prompts” was the hottest topic in the group. Now, this question is obviously outdated. What has replaced prompts is Skills.

The clear switching trigger, of course, is the appearance of OpenClaw.

Even if you can say it copied, it’s not an agent’s original creation. But it truly brought the concept of “agent” into the mainstream. It’s closer to the kind of AI you’ve seen in movies: it has personality, can remember, can plan, and can actually get things done for you—not just answer your questions.

When people used AI in the past, at its core they were still using a very smart search engine—you ask, it answers, and the next round starts over. Agents stretch that line. It will proactively push tasks forward; when it encounters obstacles, it detours; after completing one step, it keeps going with the next. The first time you see it truly handle a whole, complete task, you get a strange feeling: this thing is really doing work for me.

Then everyone started thinking: how do we make it more capable.

That’s the real reason Skills took off. Not because Skills itself is so new, but because agents made people seriously think about this question for the first time. What Skills does is equip agents with specialized abilities.

Why are Skills so important now?

An agent without Skills is like a smart newcomer who hasn’t learned anything. If you ask it to do financial analysis, it will think, but moves slowly, makes mistakes easily, and many steps require you to guide it step by step. Skills is like having it learn the complete workflow of that domain in advance—so once it’s in, it can get started right away, without you having to correct it again and again.

The Skills that are spreading the most in the community are concentrated in a few directions: workflow automation—turn the operations that used to involve bouncing back and forth between multiple tools into a chain that an agent can run end-to-end on its own; injecting domain-specific rules—so that when an agent performs high-precision tasks like legal, medical, or financial work, it won’t improvise recklessly; personalized adaptation—tune the agent to the way you work best, remember your preferences, language style, and judgment criteria; and of course, there’s another kind of Skills: things related to money, like trading.

With Polymarket’s arbitrage opportunities, ordinary people can’t understand the order book, and they also don’t have time to watch the charts and compute the price spread. But an agent equipped with specialized Skills can: monitor in real time, identify deviations, determine whether to enter the trade—running the entire set of tasks end-to-end without you needing any background knowledge in prediction markets.

Quant trading is the same. In the past, this was the business of investment banks and hedge funds—it required writing strategy code, integrating APIs, and watching backtest data. Now, someone wraps the whole process into Skills. With the agent installed, it can start executing strategies on exchanges. The barrier changes from “knowing how to code and understanding finance” to “knowing how to install Skills.”

This change isn’t about making people lazy. It’s about pushing the boundary of capability outward.

Behind these needs is a shared logic: people are starting to treat agents as a long-term collaboration partner, not just a tool you use once and then turn off.

So, what novel idea do you have—an idea you want to turn into a skill for your own agent?

If you used to have an idea, you would find a market gap but couldn’t get it off the ground. You couldn’t write code, didn’t have time to learn, outsourcing was expensive and slow—so in the end that idea just rotted in a memo. It’s different now. With vibe coding, you can directly turn your idea into a Skills—no need to build a website, no need to build an App, no need for a server, and no need to maintain a team.

The underlying logic behind this is: agents will be a must-have for everyone. The Skills you create don’t need to acquire customers on your own—it naturally runs on the agents that everyone is already using. The market is there, the channels are there. All you need to do is build the thing that others haven’t done yet.

Before, there was a technical team in between “I have a great idea” and “I have a product that can run.” Now, that distance has been compressed into a weekend.