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mitkox/skillopt

Analysis updated 2026-05-18

66PythonAudience · developerComplexity · 3/5LicenseSetup · moderate

TLDR

A tool that automatically rewrites an AI agent's system prompt by testing it, finding failures, and improving the instructions over multiple training rounds.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((SkillOpt))
    What it does
      Tests agent instructions
      Rewrites failing prompts
      Keeps best version
    Tech stack
      Python
      OpenAI-compatible API
      Ollama
    Use cases
      Improve coding agent prompts
      Optimize local LLM instructions
      Benchmark prompt quality
    Audience
      Developers
      AI tinkerers
    Setup
      Local model server
      No GPU needed

Code map

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What do people build with it?

USE CASE 1

Automatically improve a coding agent's system prompt using its own failed test cases

USE CASE 2

Optimize instructions for a local model running through Ollama or LM Studio

USE CASE 3

Iterate a skill document across training epochs and keep the best-performing version

USE CASE 4

Benchmark and tune agent instructions without retraining the underlying model

What is it built with?

PythonOllamaOpenAI API

How does it compare?

mitkox/skilloptafadtc/afa-dtc-skillsalibaba-multimodal-industrial-ai/industrybench
Stars666666
LanguagePythonPythonPython
Setup difficultymoderateeasymoderate
Complexity3/52/53/5
Audiencedeveloperpm founderresearcher

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

How do you get it running?

Difficulty · moderate Time to first run · 30min

Needs a local OpenAI-API-compatible server (Ollama, LM Studio) or a cloud API key.

MIT, free to use, modify, and distribute for any purpose, including commercial use.

In plain English

SkillOpt is a tool for automatically improving the instructions you give to an AI agent. When you use an AI agent for a specific task (say, debugging code, answering questions, or filling in spreadsheets), the agent's performance depends heavily on the system prompt or skill document it starts with. SkillOpt treats that document like code to be optimized: it runs the agent against a set of test cases, evaluates how well it performed, identifies where it failed, and rewrites the instructions to address those failures. It repeats this loop across multiple training epochs and keeps the best-performing version. Critically, the model itself is never changed. SkillOpt only edits the text of the instructions. The result is a file called best_skill.md that you can drop into any agent setup that uses the same model. This approach means you do not need access to GPU hardware for training or any ability to modify model weights. The project is designed to work with locally-running AI models through any server that speaks the OpenAI API format (such as Ollama, LM Studio, or llama.cpp). You point it at your local server with two environment variables, pick a benchmark task, and run a training script. Cloud providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Azure are also supported if you prefer not to run a local server. The repo includes a simple C# debugging example called DotNetDebug as a self-contained test case so you can verify your setup works without downloading an external benchmark dataset. Several other benchmarks (document question answering, math problems, spreadsheet generation, and embodied navigation tasks) are supported but require their own separate dataset downloads. This is an open-source fork focused on local AI workflows, based on a research paper from 2026. The project is licensed under MIT.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Set up SkillOpt to optimize my agent's system prompt against a custom benchmark
Prompt 2
Run the DotNetDebug example to verify my local model server works with SkillOpt
Prompt 3
Point SkillOpt at my local Ollama server and improve my coding assistant's instructions
Prompt 4
Explain how SkillOpt evaluates and rewrites failing agent responses

Frequently asked questions

What is skillopt?

A tool that automatically rewrites an AI agent's system prompt by testing it, finding failures, and improving the instructions over multiple training rounds.

What language is skillopt written in?

Mainly Python. The stack also includes Python, Ollama, OpenAI API.

What license does skillopt use?

MIT, free to use, modify, and distribute for any purpose, including commercial use.

How hard is skillopt to set up?

Setup difficulty is rated moderate, with roughly 30min to a first successful run.

Who is skillopt for?

Mainly developer.

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