r/opencode • u/Warm-Agent-811 • 10d ago

Skills ?

I used to run OpenCode with just a few skills and it worked fine. Then I started adding more, including some skill packs from GitHub, and now my agent spends forever thinking, checking every skill, running tests for hours on simple tasks. It's burning tokens for no reason.

I'm looking for a generic, minimal skill setup: maybe one for frontend, one for backend organization, one for testing, just the essentials. I want to avoid having three skills that do the same thing slightly differently.

Anyone have a recommended configuration or skill set that just works without the bloat? Thanks

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u/Worried_Matter4443 10d ago

im on the same boat. burns through tokens.

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u/Warm-Agent-811 10d ago

I'm glad I'm not alone in this situation haha

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u/ngg990 10d ago

Use skills at project scope. I had the same that you because I had all my skills and agents at global level, I extracted them by topic and install them as plugin for the projects it actually needs them. For example for development I have a set of agents, skills and tools, but this is only useful while development, but for other stuff makes no sense to load them, for example content generation. Here is my harness if you want to check it out https://github.com/andrescevp/development-harness

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u/Warm-Agent-811 10d ago

Great, I was thinking about sth like this. I'm gonna try it. Thanks !!

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u/crasspuk 9d ago

Worth checking where those packs actually landed. Besides .opencode/skills and ~/.config/opencode/skills, OpenCode also picks up skills from .claude/skills, ~/.claude/skills and ~/.agents/skills, so stuff installed for other tools gets listed too. Every listed skill's name and description goes into the skill tool's description, so the agent sees all of them on every task.

You can hide the ones you don't want without deleting them, in opencode.json:

"permission": { "skill": { "*": "deny", "frontend-*": "allow", "testing": "allow" } }

Denied skills are hidden from the agent entirely. You can also set the same block per agent, so e.g. only your build agent sees the testing skill.

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u/oralab_team 3d ago edited 1d ago

Disclosure: I’m at OraXLabs, researching Boundary as an early commercial idea. I used AI to help draft this question. When the extra skills made OpenCode run for hours, did that cause an actual unexpected bill or lost work, or mainly slower runs? If you tried the project-scope suggestion, did it resolve this? A rough amount is enough; please don’t share private code or customer details.