Agent Skills Are Just Header Files (And Virtual Memory, And Unix Pipes)

If you've written C, used Linux, or shipped software in the last 30 years, you already understand how AI agents work. You just don't know it yet. The Problem Nobody Tells You About Every blog post about LLM agents starts with breathless excitement: "Agents can use tools! Agents can reason! Agents can do anything!" Then you actually try to build one. And you hit a wall. You have an LLM. You want to give it 50 capabilities — search, summarize, query a database, send emails, generate images, parse