Consider providing dedicated prompts or skills for complicated breaking change guides

[parlough]

It seems the UIScene and Built-in Kotlin breaking changes/migrations are quite complicated and keep getting more complicated with sometimes multiple additions or clarifications a week. I worry they are getting a bit hard to follow.

Can we/should we suggest developers try using agents to help them with the migrations? If so, is giving them the current guides sufficient, should we provide an optional prompt to get them started? Are the current guides we have now sufficient for agents or we create something more focused or more effective for agents?

I imagine the impact for these two cases is potentially limited now but perhaps it can be an exploration to set a pattern for complicated migrations going forward?

@jmagman @reidbaker @lamek for thoughts.

[reidbaker]

There has been some back and forth on an internal chat room and the most recent conclusion is that the intent for the agent-plugins repos for dart and flutter is for user journeys that are frequent not one off migrations. (Maybe that should change?)

I believe @jesswrd is working on a skill or prompt for the kotlin migration. What is not clear is where to publish it or any formal validation criteria that should happen prior to publishing.

Even if we said agents are good at the migrations and we encouraged their use our documentation has to support devs who do not have the ability to run an agent.

Continually documenting what we know and addressing corner cases is the path forward even if agents are great at migrations.

[reidbaker]

@mariamhas as the pm working on our agentic strategy

[parlough]

Even if we said agents are good at the migrations and we encouraged their use our documentation has to support devs who do not have the ability to run an agent.

Continually documenting what we know and addressing corner cases is the path forward even if agents are great at migrations.

Yeah that definitely makes sense to continue to follow, thanks for the input. My hope is migration documentation that is good for developers should be good for agents as well. It would feel unfortunate to duplicate it all in a completely separate skill.

Perhaps all that's needed is ensuring the docs have a focused section on how to validate you migrated successfully, then we could add a basic prompt (with a link to the guide(s) or the Markdown version of them) that's easy to copy and paste?

[reidbaker]

I would say it differently. We believe (as least a subset of flutter contributors) that some form of agentic published something, that is not a skill you keep installed, will be valuable to users. It makes sense that those might be published on the website. I don't think you need to tackle what level of confidence or testing needs to happen before those can be published. I do think you are a good advocate for where/how/formatting etc those either skills or prompts get published to the web.