Product Builder: Agent Skills
Hosted by Ryan Smith
What you'll learn
The Agent vs. Skill Distinction
The fundamental architectural principle: agents define behavior, skills define tools. You'll understand why.
Context Window Economics
Learn the delegation architecture pattern where an orchestrator assigns scoped context to specialist agents.
The Daisy-Chain Pattern
Skills can trigger their own sub-agents on demand - no orchestrator micromanagement required.
Why this topic matters
Every product builder experimenting with AI hits workflows that work in demo but collapse under complexity. Agents forget instructions, context windows overflow, and tightly-coupled systems resist change. This session gives you the decision framework to architect AI workflows that actually scale.
"From now on, each library or CLI should [be] bundled with it's own agent skill." - CTO, Hugging Face
You'll learn from
Ryan Smith
CEO at Smith Horn Group, Lead Instructor at 021:Events, Faculty at Emily Carr
Ryan is founder of Skillsmith, an x-Shopify Product Leader, and prior deep learning founder, who shipped 6M+ lines of code on GitHub in 2025 with Claude Code. He holds a US Patent in computer vision, an MBA from UBC, and currently helps enterprise teams like Asana, Cloudinary, and Boeing adopt agentic AI workflows.
Shopify
Go deeper with a course
Product Builder: Agentic Skills
Ryan Smith
Founder of Skillsmith, x-Shopify, Delphia (YC18), and deep learning founder