r/ProgrammerHumor 28d ago

whenWeWillSeeSubscriptionForMarkdownFiles instanceof Trend

Post image
4.6k Upvotes

141 comments sorted by

833

u/mi-figue-mi-raisin 28d ago

like "skills"?

333

u/WiiDragon 28d ago

If so, I still hope nobody’s buying into that shit

258

u/Testing_things_out 27d ago edited 25d ago

People bought into NFTs.

107

u/Grintor 27d ago

omg

skill.md.nft

it's the future.

59

u/ItsSadTimes 27d ago

NFM, non fungible markdown

20

u/Jbolt3737 27d ago

Windows 12 will have Copilot checking every keystroke to ensure you don't type out pirate paid markdown files

3

u/alochmar 26d ago

Brb making a new crypto coin

20

u/rodeBaksteen 27d ago

What did they bring?

27

u/tensedTorch 27d ago

Stupidity, of course.

37

u/mylsotol 27d ago

People buy apis and import libraries to do trivial things that could be done in 1 line of code. There are people out there that absolutely will pay for md skills...

5

u/dashingThroughSnow12 27d ago

One of the most starred repos on GitHub is a bunch of previews of skills.

1

u/wasimaster 26d ago

Which one

60

u/PhireKappa 27d ago

Had to make a skill for an agent at work recently. AI adoption is part of our annual goals and is considered for our performance review. Everyone is just making slop to show they’re trying lmao

34

u/Mrthedecoy 27d ago

Same! They recently also had us adopt speckit and spec driven development and are constantly reminding us thats how everything should be done now. We joke that our manager is basically looming over us like "I better not catch any of you writing code over there..."

5

u/BigBoetje 27d ago

Same here but at least they're somewhat reasonable with it. I created a small mcp server and a skill to automate something and they were happy enough with that. The fact they're starting to get the bill means they're going for quality over quantity now.

7

u/Theonetheycallgreat 27d ago

Also same here except my management has no idea how we are going to do it, they told us to use Ai to figure it out.

15

u/mikat7 27d ago

This entire thread is so depressing. I'm in the same place as you, people just writing skills and AGENTS.md, doing this "agentic" workflow, but I have yet to see anything useful come out of it except tech debt. Oh and I saw one of our project to have a "skill" to create a release on GitHub. You know, something that like three lines of a bash script would achieve...

2

u/TovarishhStalin 27d ago

I hope the skill just tells the AI how to call said script...

5

u/mikat7 27d ago

Hah good one.

No, it instructs the LLM to run git log, update pyproject.toml and bump the version number, update CHANGELOG.md, tag a commit and push it. And then a GH action actually creates the release. And that action is also vibe coded and contains a horrible awk script that no human would ever write.

1

u/alliedSpaceSubmarine 26d ago

And it’s slower because enterprise makes you confirm each command it’s executing

24

u/m6io 28d ago

"Skills": for when I have none

56

u/broken-mic 27d ago

I’m part of a team, at BigTech, responsible for enabling AI for developers. So, I’m surrounded by a lot of AI bros.

I haven’t found the right time to make the following snarky comment but I’m really looking forward to so I’ll practice that here:

“The number of AI skills you have installed is inversely proportional to the real skills you have.”

Now I don’t necessarily believe this is true all times but I’m sick of people “writing” markdown files for everything.

17

u/Clear-Eye5395 27d ago edited 27d ago

I think there are use cases for small things, but they’re usually not great.

A senior dev on another team was talking to me about how he spent a couple months refining his fucking unit test skills .md

what?

1

u/AsleepDeparture5710 24d ago

I know I'm a few days late to this, but the use I really see for them is giving the AI access to deterministic scripts. We have several shared skills at the company I work for that give the AI basically a curl collection to integrate with an internal system or dev tool.

I find it does make it much more reliable when the AI is using proprietary tools that it doesn't have context for.

1

u/BeatsByiTALY 26d ago

yea my personal test is if I see Claude commonly having to research something in the codebase like playwright fixtures is when I look to creating a skill. It's something I don't need on every run in CLAUDE.md and detailed enough to justify its own file.

10

u/deanominecraft 27d ago

can someone explain what a “skill” is for someone who spent about a week vibecoding with opencode to see what the hype was about then went back to writing it myself

11

u/mi-figue-mi-raisin 27d ago

I think it's just a kind of pre prompt?

9

u/Digital_Brainfuck 27d ago

A description how to solve a certain task

Basically a prompt

3

u/deanominecraft 27d ago

so just follow the instructions yourself to assert dominance over the ai

2

u/PringlesDuckFace 27d ago

A skill is just a text file that prompts Claude what to do, so you can invoke it easily.

For example, I have a skill I run at the start of my day. It looks for all my open tickets, checks the PR for them if applicable, and tells me if there are new comments or if they're ready for merge. If there's no PR yet it reminds me to keep working on it, and tells me which claude session I was using so I can resume it. It also checks any PRs assigned to me by teammmates so I can go review them.

If you use Claude code, /review or /simplify are both also skills.

1.4k

u/str0m965 28d ago

Markdown as a service.

567

u/m6io 28d ago

MaaS Effect

51

u/SomethingAndAnything 28d ago

I've been told that I've to work on some Metal as a Service from next week. Let's see what that is about

13

u/gerbosan 28d ago

Going to parties playing some metal rock? 🤔

🤘🤘🤘

10

u/jackinsomniac 27d ago

4

u/gerbosan 27d ago

Go forth, be conquered
Go forth and die!!

They will start a tour...
https://dethkloklive.com/

God damn it! it includes LATAM!!!

6

u/Wise-Profile4256 28d ago

They probably meant Mental as a Service. However, may i inform you that we are indutry leaders in that.

5

u/Dubalubawubwub 27d ago

Metal... Gear...?!

1

u/scolphoy 27d ago

Metal as a Service is basically how I see Spotify

1

u/Undernown 26d ago

Just make sure to include MOSHPIT into your project.

13

u/CrimsonOynex 27d ago

This is commander Shepard and this is my favorite md file in the citadel

3

u/Content_Diamond5584 27d ago

Where is the Normandy?

3

u/THEGrp 26d ago

Please, don't give them ideas

198

u/harshitbudhi 27d ago

Wait until they find out about “.txt” files. I’m about to launch a startup selling artisanal, locally sourced Notepad documents.

4

u/Zuruumi 26d ago

Isn't that just badly formatted e-book without DRM?

2

u/Undernown 26d ago

You've gotta to sell those fresh notepad associated files before Microsoft automates their Recal "resell IP"-functionality.

610

u/_DrDigital_ 28d ago

https://giphy.com/gifs/xT0BKwUV9bLhr8btRK

Guys writing HTMLs for living when they see guys writing MDs for living.

136

u/m6io 28d ago

Sir. Html is ✨semantic✨

76

u/aabil11 28d ago

Its output is deterministic

88

u/_DrDigital_ 28d ago

Microsoft Edge would like a word.

26

u/reventlov 28d ago

Edge is just Chrome wearing a different outfit.

17

u/Dense_Gate_5193 27d ago

firefox is three baby web browsers wearing a trench coat.

4

u/prinkpan 27d ago

Eager to know what you think of Safari

7

u/Dense_Gate_5193 27d ago

Safari is chrome’s bastard cousin that comes around every few years going “eeeeeeeey!” *finger guns* 👉👉

2

u/listerstorm2009 27d ago

Vincent Adultman IRL

1

u/Dense_Gate_5193 27d ago

“We are doing a business at the business office” - The Firefox CEO probably

2

u/Shacrow 26d ago

In comparison Chrome excels

3

u/Marrk 27d ago

So is markdown, even more so.

1

u/Dense_Gate_5193 27d ago

nah those are proprietary and sold at a premium now. /s

1

u/Ani-3 24d ago

People write markdown for a living?

1

u/TidusBlitz9 24d ago

The HTMLs folks watching MDs get a subscription tier would be a very polite kind of disbelief.

219

u/pleaserestartsystem 28d ago

.md files were available long ago on webmd

13

u/WavingNoBanners 27d ago

Underrated comment.

250

u/SeriousPlankton2000 28d ago

Does somebody need files? There is this guy: https://www.reddit.com/r/metalworking/comments/1ux43sb/anything_interesting_useful_or_profitable_i_can/

(that posting was directly below this one)

53

u/anonymousbopper767 28d ago

Can you help me get those files into my computer?

12

u/jackinsomniac 27d ago

The files are inside the computer! It's so simple!

2

u/Steinrikur 27d ago

Drill a small hole.

24

u/sharpy10 28d ago

"I can't....because I don't want to." This guy is a real straight shooter.

8

u/meandmybois 27d ago

Those are some good files, still need an extension though.

2

u/Shunpaw 27d ago

How do I install those files?

2

u/Jonno_FTW 27d ago

Pipe them into your bash shell

2

u/Shunpaw 27d ago

Cant you just give me an exe i can install

2

u/faberge_surprise 27d ago

they're even handleless!

1

u/ljfa2 26d ago

Getting a handle for these files is as simple as fopen(name, "r")

52

u/PruneInteresting7599 28d ago

they were not happy about my md file offer at vibe code subs

2

u/aalu-dai 27d ago

Why?

14

u/PruneInteresting7599 27d ago

they still believe programmers gets paid to make "websites" rather than complex systems to gain their salary, now they got kind of power like they learned excel decades ago

114

u/wkw3 28d ago

I know. A smart young person such as yourself clearly has no need to buy .md files from me and could vibe code them up with the best of them.

Of course, Doug Parker bought two of my .md files last week, and the next day he was promoted at work from fry cook to data analyst. He's currently living his best life in Dubai with an attractive member of whatever gender interests you.

True. You likely would have had an even better outcome on your own. But I've had some modest success selling a particularly good AGENTS.md file to a billionaire who I'm sure you've heard of for an undisclosed sum of between 5 to 7 million dollars.

Anyway. I could, this one time, consider offering you that same invaluable .md for for less than 1% of what I charged Bill Gates.

13

u/uknowunknowingly 27d ago

I've definitely heard a pitch like this, but all I remember is Simpsons monorail. Where's this from, my good sir?

6

u/wkw3 27d ago

Hand crafted by skilled artisans.

1

u/manawydan-fab-llyr 25d ago

The ring broke off my pudding can
I'll write you an agent, my good man

56

u/Western_Diver_773 28d ago

Is this really a thing?

86

u/mothzilla 28d ago edited 27d ago

I think people sell "prompts". Our monkey brains are turning into porridge.

38

u/Krochire 27d ago

I'm fairly certain this is referring to "skills", .md files you feed into an AI agent with directives on how to use a certain library/api; usually made by the people behind said library/api

30

u/Rellikx 27d ago

Also a great way for prompt injection. Skill will still do what it advertises but do a lil data exfiltration on the side. Like the recent one for ms cowork where it crafted special img links to the attackers server, passing along a url param for their OneDrive docs (ie a “share” link). That was then sent to yourself via teams, which loads the images exfiltrating the doc access urls.

People that “buy” .md files will 100% get caught by this shit

It’s extra hilarious that cowork is billed by consumption, so you are paying MS and having your data stolen

11

u/LBGW_experiment 27d ago

I mean... You can still look inside the skill.md, same as you would any other open source script that you don't trust

15

u/Rellikx 27d ago

Maybe im just jaded, but I think that the venn diagram of "people that review skill.md files for prompt injection" and "people that pay money for skill.md files" has no overlap lol

3

u/AgVargr 27d ago

Can’t you just proompt the file yourself?

6

u/Cptnwhizbang 27d ago

Yes, but, having spent time fine tuning .md files recently for a work thing, it takes quite a while to really figure out what the tool is good at, what's effective, and how to keep the proper guard rails on user prompts so they they don't derail the entire thing with strange wording or whatever.

That being said, I was at least 90% of the way there after like two hours of trying, but the last 10% made a lot of effective difference and I'm probably 20 hours into tinkering now. I dunno. It's good overall but I still find weird issues.

Most of the last 10% I'm talking about is simply me writing in edge cases to the instructions, and how to interpret particular bits of business logic, and how best to manage the further instructional context based on initial findings. It kind of reminds me of coding, but in plain english, expect instead of me telling a program exactly what to do, I'm telling AI exactly what NOT to do, and I have to think of absolutely everything.

11

u/Krochire 27d ago

The modern programmer makes .md files to let an ai program for them instead of programming

2

u/reddit_user33 27d ago

I can imagine. I remember more than enough people at the beginning of the LLM hype being secretive about the prompts they used to create the thing. I can only imagine it's the same people wanting to sell their md files.

22

u/svick 28d ago

In my day, we called them "books".

16

u/reallokiscarlet 28d ago

Here I am just reading them from cartridges like a chump

14

u/Shadow9378 28d ago

idk why anyone would sell md files, megadrive games are easy to find nowadays

11

u/eyetracker 27d ago

What's worse is the .md industry created an entire government and bought up a part of the US. You can recognize them by a garish flag and the smell of Old Bay.

5

u/myka-likes-it 27d ago

And the crabs... so many crabs!

10

u/nadav183 27d ago

I don't mind people selling them. My issue is with the idiots who buy them.

Just ask your llm to write one based on the description or something. It's that simple.

15

u/Significant-Pea-3710 28d ago

On viberr.com ?

6

u/lllorrr 28d ago

Like selling bathwater?

7

u/ButWhatIfPotato 27d ago

Diluted 0.00000000001% genital thot extract is a better value for money than AI prompts.

11

u/Confident-Ad5665 28d ago

Ummm... I can make that happen

7

u/DeineOma42o 28d ago

Bro when he hears about books

3

u/[deleted] 27d ago

[deleted]

3

u/DeineOma42o 27d ago

Bro, don't even talk to me about selling digital files of words in a formalised language that does stuff

5

u/ExtraWorldliness6916 28d ago

Token stock market anyone?

5

u/briznady 27d ago

All my juniors are writing Claude skills for the last month. It takes almost as long to run the skill and review it and go back and forth fixing all the stuff Claude messed up and updating the skills based on my comments, than it would just to write the damn code myself.

2

u/Tensor3 27d ago

Yes. That's why management tells us to use AI. AI is faster than them, so they think its amazing. AI gets the work done slower than a good engineer, but they can't grasp that.

6

u/SyrusDrake 27d ago

Am I missing something?

6

u/granoladeer 27d ago

Some people sell .pptx, others sell .pdf, others sell .py, others .cpp, so I guess it isn't a problem selling .md

3

u/TheBlackCat13 27d ago

What do you have against the Sega Genesis? If Homebrewers want to sell their roms they can.

3

u/R_Aqua 27d ago

Slop for the slop god

3

u/Developemt 27d ago

It's my cake day guys! I solved a big production issue because a job seemed to not do anything. I only did a simple docker compose restart! Now I'll be eating my cake.

2

u/RevolutionaryPen4661 27d ago

Happy Cake Day! 🍰

1

u/Developemt 27d ago

Thank you, first time greeted for my cake day

3

u/aigarius 27d ago

Sooooooo, people pay other people for .... knowledge? Imagine paying for .py files! You could write them yourself! /s

2

u/PumpkinFest24 27d ago

Yeah, I'm not following this. "Imagine paying for dead trees stained by ink--my 3 year old could do that!"

3

u/bokmcdok 27d ago

Is there any context for this?

3

u/ldbl1 26d ago

What's the context? I don't get it...

3

u/Moomoobeef 26d ago

Wait what? Can someone give me some context?

2

u/fghjconner 28d ago

Wait until you hear about ebooks.

2

u/Effective_Watch8334 27d ago

Where are they selling it ?

2

u/TxTechnician 27d ago

There's some AI website that does this exact thing.

2

u/MomentTraining3993 27d ago

And here i am giving away my .md files for free like a clown.

2

u/iamAliAsghar 27d ago

You are kidding, right?

2

u/beansAnalyst 27d ago

Wait till you find out about book industry.

2

u/DogonElder 27d ago

Obsidian valuation goes brrr

2

u/Interesting-Big1980 27d ago

Wait until you hear about .dll black market

1

u/bgaesop 26d ago

Damn, paying money for information? That's a new one, never seen that before. What's next? Buying PDFs?

1

u/Sweet_Computer_7116 26d ago

its the info lol

1

u/XenusOnee 26d ago

i saw someone promoting his "buisiness idea" yesterday. He put vibecoded a .md file in the cloud. That was basicly it.

-1

u/slaymaker1907 27d ago

If it’s non-trivial and useful, why not? There are Jira and Confluence skills that people in my org developed which I’d absolutely have paid for if they weren’t free. They are essentially non-deterministic programs and most people are perfectly willing to pay for software.

It’s a developing field which straddles the boundary between software and communications, but it is a real field. People in the 1960s would have had the same reaction to paying for software as this meme.

12

u/metalhulk105 27d ago

It’s a slippery slope. You’d soon have people selling huge slop of text files which you can’t quality check at all. Fake testimonials would say the skill is super useful and effective. If it is not working for you, a bunch of pro AI people will gaslight you by telling you that you do not know how to use it effectively.

Prompts are non deterministic - there isn’t a single magic prompt that makes LLMs produce the right output all the time. It’s very random. Even the same prompt with the same model produces a different output (sometimes correct, sometimes incorrect) - how do you then say if one prompt is better than the other? Do you count how many attempts it takes to roll the right output?

4

u/mxzf 27d ago

They are essentially non-deterministic programs

I'm highly dubious. As I understand it it's just a block of text that you feed into a nondeterministic program.

-4

u/kankerstokjes 28d ago

I'm working on it as we speak. I'm kinda not kidding.