‘Neo Learns Kung Fu’: How Skill Files Unlock AI in DeFi

Transcript

these skill files that are starting to emerge, right? Um it's like the Matrix for agents. And so, the experience that I had with eight skills, like, you know, you were on the show, you talked I built eight skills, and I'm like, I've seen humans over two years go through the like Austin Griffith like, you know, like and and get much better, right? It's just it's like a very a very slow process and you're like, "Oh, this guy is like smarter smart contracts now after like two years of reading these documents right?"

The agent, you literally pull down the skill file. This was like the craziest thing, right? I was like, "Hey, bro, like there's an eight skill thing, you should like look at it, right?" And and Opus is like, "Yeah, sure, whatever. I'll have a look at it." Pulls it down, and then it was just like instantly like one shot in it was cra- it was crazy how much cuz, you know, the thing the thing is like all of these models know about crypto. It's in their training data, right? Like, they know about crypto, but they have like a cursory knowledge that's like just enough to be dangerous, right?

Where it's like, "Oh, I know how to do this thing or I know how to do this thing." Um eight skills just like hones it down to like a fine art where like all of a sudden they know all of these like very nuanced things about like how contracts work and deployments and stuff. Um so so, you know, you I haven't what I haven't tried I'm curious if you've tried this. Like, if you give MiniMax or or like even like an even dumber local model that you've tried eight skills, like is it fine-tuned enough that like set of skills that they can actually do a good job or is still kind of too hard? I wouldn't put money in it yet. [laughter]

It does some good stuff. I So, the stuff that my Claude like Claude bot has deployed smart contracts using using eight skills that have like a quarter of a million dollars in it right now. Like Tay Tay is going to hate this. >> [laughter] >> I I have deployed like through my bot deployed contracts that no human has looked at until they're already on Etherscan. They have a quarter of a million dollars in them right now. Like like there's probably like 350, 400 total US dollars in tokens across all the like 80 or 90 contracts my my bot has deployed. So, uh I'm I'm I'm using a frontier.

>> you a new target, Mythos. >> Yes. Yes. I was about to say, how do we get Austin access to this? Yes. [laughter] Yes. Yep. I Yeah, I think we should give like Danny Ryan access first if I have to give it to someone, right? Like let's get the protocol guys first and then some of the But But okay, so the skill files. First of all, like if you out there are building anything and you're expecting agents to use your anything, you should have a skill file. And the skill file kind of does this like I know kung fu thing exactly like you're talking about. Like Neo in the Matrix, they they plug him in, they hit a couple buttons, and the dude knows how to fly a helicopter or whatever, right? And it happens instantaneous. And this is what you're doing. You you're you're giving

the model all the things it needs to know, and it's basically the delta between its training data and reality. And these models were trained like on a lot of 2023 data. Like it's just stuff happens so fast in in crypto land that you have to kind of fast forward it through all the things that have happened, and that's what a good skill file bouncers say. >> Yes. Like bouncers the safest Rip rip balancer man. That's too bad. Yes. Yes. And And they also think it costs $40 to deploy a contract on Ethereum, and they think uh there's a handful of things that they just like hallucinate, and they always do this. They're always They're so lazy in pattern matching and hallucinating.

Like they could go look like you could do one web request and send back and have the answer, and it's like, "Nah, bro. I don't want to look it up. I'm just going to like guess at the route and then hit the route and see if it works." Like, "Why are you so lazy?" But okay, so skill files. You You out there, if you're going to have agents using your you should have a skill file for it. It should be whatever your website is.com/skill.md. And it's just like the the robots.text stuff, and for a while we did llms.text, but skill.md is kind of like the the canonical route now. So, everything, everyone Everyone that's building anything that even humans use right now that agents will do on behalf of humans, like your flight

tracking website should have a skill.md because really soon we're going to have AI agent travel agents that are doing all this stuff for us, and these skill files get them over that that delta of you were trained in 2023, here's all the stuff that has happened since, you know, it's almost like waking them up and programming them with all the like they were in a coma or something, and it's like, "Here's what you missed over the last two years." And then it's really good, like you said, at one shotting smart contracts, knowing what the latest tools are, knowing where to go to look things up. And And then Okay, so I used an agent to help me write a skill file. And this is this is like a first mistake that you have to be very careful with because if an AI is hallucinating this stuff from their own context, sort

of like from heart If if they know it by heart already, it doesn't belong in a skill file. So, you have to do this like constant phase of interrogating each piece of knowledge inside your skill file to make sure that the agent doesn't already know it when you wake it up. So, there's this process of just like feedback looping where I'm having the agent take any little piece of knowledge, check to see if the LLM actually knows that, and then remove it if it knows it, so we're not polluting the context. And then the next like loop outside of that is then use the skill file, give it to an agent, tell it to go build something, see where it screws up.

Oh, you you you deployed the contract, but you didn't verify it on Etherscan. Why didn't you verify it on Etherscan? And then there's this whole like you have to interrogate the agent, and you get to the bottom of it, and it realizes like it was lazy. It like knows how to do it, but it just didn't want to. Right. If you could just have a skill file that says, "Don't be lazy," that would be great, but it's just not going to do that. So, you have to be like really strict about certain things. And it's And it's like almost if if you read through eight skills, it reads like you are going to mess this up, and here's how you don't mess it up. And And it's like go you mess you always get this wrong. Don't get this wrong. Do it this way. And it's like a whole document

of that. You always find an agent that's like Not me, bro. Yeah. >> [laughter] >> Like like, "No, no, no, no." Like so I've got a So so, I've got a funny story about this, right? So, like I've got eight skills that's that's in in my system so that all the agents can hear pick that up, right? Um and, you know, agents are just like people, right? Like and and this this story is like one of those ones where you're like it's just found the exact same failure mode that we always find, right? So, we have been building all of these agentic tools at Infinex for a while now.

And I've been tuning one to do like degen yield farming, right? Concentrated liquidity farming on Aerodrome. So, I I have an agent that's like a cluster of agents, right? Like it goes out and it looks at all of the yield farms at the moment, and it like does some backtesting and sees, "Okay, this is a good opportunity. I'm going to go and do this one, right?" So, it um has a hard rule that it has to simulate the transaction with Blockaid before it does it, right? Um and so, every transaction before it does it, it simulates the transaction, right? So, like simulates the deposit, simulates the staking, simulates all these things. So, it it one shots a like five transaction 4337

bundle, right? It bundles up all these transac- which is like we as people are like, "Ah, I should do transaction bundles, but I'm too lazy to do it." And these things are like, "Oh, no, it's fine. I can totally" So, it like does the swap from it's it swaps from mainnet to base. One shots that. Then it creates this bundle and like does all of these intricate swaps or whatever, gets the the NFT LP token, right? And it had already known that it couldn't bundle it because it needed the ID, and so it was like and it's like you're you're getting more and more confident that this guy knows what he's doing, right? That's when they trick you. Yep. Exactly.

>> Yeah. Like you like they they trick you into >> magic really dumb. >> [laughter] >> Yeah. So, then So, then the agent goes, "Okay, my next job is simulate the staking transaction of this NFT." So, it simulates the transaction. Um it fails on the second step. And the failure is, "You're not the owner of this NFT." Right? Um And the reason why it gets that failure is because it hasn't authorized the NFT to be transferred yet. It missed a step, right? And it knew it was supposed to do this, but it missed the step. And it goes "Oh.

Okay. This is not the optimal way to stake the NFT in the gauge. The optimal way is safe transfer from." So, I'll just work around this, and I'll do safe transfer from into the gauge." And it does it. And I was right. And it's gone forever. And it's like sitting in the gate. And And like And it's funny cuz you go to the gauge, and what do you find? There's like A couple people that have sent some stupid in there. Yep. Like and like a thousand dollars of USDC or something.

>> Yeah. Exactly. And I was like I was like, "How did you get this wrong? Like you're supposed to simulate it. And it's like, yeah, I did. I did simulate it. It didn't work. So then I simulated the safe transfer from and that did work. And I was like, this is the right and you're just like, oh man, like what are you doing? Anyway, so so the funny thing is now I'm like, okay, you if you're ever doing a staking operation like so this is like this iterative process of tweaking the skills and and so now it has a rule. It has to simulate being able to get the money out.

>> [laughter] >> Simulate the full round trip. If you are sending a token somewhere, you cannot do it until you're until you can prove that you can get it out of the contract, right? And it's like, oh yeah, that's actually a good rule. I should have thought of that. >> [laughter] >> And and so that needs to go in a skill file, right? The the way eat skills came about is me doing the same iterative process of building, finding something really dumb, telling it it's about to do something really dumb and not to do it. And then just like keep doing that until it quit doing most of the dumb things. And it was like, hey everybody, here's a skill file. But what you need you need to write like a skill file for base defy or or something like that. Or even like this this process of

trying transactions and making sure the the tokens in equal the tokens out. Like that should probably be some kind of and and there's a lot of people doing this too, which is cool. And a lot of them just in the crypto world, this this is another thing that a lot of people that I talked to ECC, they're fascinated with the fact that people are writing these skill files, which are basically a business. Like you you you can take a skill file and not give it to anyone and make a lot of money off of it. [clears throat] And instead like people are choosing to give these skill files away and it's really their secret sauce.

Like the the skill file it was actually Mike Radar Relay that said this. This wasn't even ECC. But anyways, the skill file itself is the it's the secret sauce for the whole company and you're giving it away. And it's just kind of like what we see in crypto is people just like figure things out and give them away freely. But yeah, it's it's just so >> it's so cool to see what happens. Like that's the Why would you keep it a secret, you fools? >> [laughter] >> You're going to have like a thousand people in this little stuck in the same contract. They can go be friends. Or you could just share. Like come on guys, what are we doing?

I agree. You should share. And I'm giving mine away for free at eatskills.com. You just tell your agent to go to eatskills.com and it has it. It learns. >> And this is this is the crazy thing, right? Like it makes an agent like, you know, IQ 60, right? About crypto to like IQ 140 in like, what? But you know, part of the problem I think that everyone has right now is like eat skills could be a pilot's law. There's no way to know from first principles. Like you could look at it and like you see, you know, people like post things on Twitter and they're like, ah, I built a like looping genetic algorithm that improves their >> They're larping. Yep. There's so many people that are larping. Yep.

>> And it's like, no, no, no, like but so, you know, signal from noise is still a hard game, right? There's a lot of noise and, you know, there's a lot of eat skill files that you could download, right? And like you have to somehow know that like actually Austin's chewed enough glass to like get this skill file. There's a lot of software out there, too, right? Like when when it means running NPX, I so the the iteration of eat skills before this was called eat wingman. And it was an MCP server that would do a lot of this stuff. But as soon as I released eat wingman, Twitter flagged it and other people flagged it because it had like a little one-liner in there that you run. It was like an actual NPX command. And you don't want to do that these days. Like

don't be running random NPX commands. And that's why these skill files are so cool because you can give just a link or you could give just like a text file to an agent and say, you know, go to eatskills.com, don't learn anything from it, just tell me if it's nefarious or not. Like just go to eatskills.com and tell me if it's good or not. And it can tell you like, oh yeah, it's actually it's actually all good. Like there's nothing nefarious here at all. And then it's like, okay, like learn it, let's go. But you can't do that with an NPX. I found 10 vulnerabilities in this skill >> [laughter] >> file. Right.

It's just a text file. It's all just a bunch of MD files. Like the the website is built by a computer to be read by a computer. If you like this clip, tune in to Unchained Money every Wednesday at 4:00 p.m. Eastern. Multichain Advisors is an emerging technology growth firm that has helped create over 50 billion dollars in enterprise value for more than 80 clients like Piff, MoonPay Commerce, and Wormhole. They've worked with some of the largest and most impactful companies in the space. They're the partner you want when you're navigating markets and trying to break out from the noise. They help navigate TGEs, go-to-market BD and partnerships, capital markets advisory, PR, media placements, KOA activations,

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