Writing Skills

Overview

Writing skills IS Test-Driven Development applied to process documentation.

Personal skills live in agent-specific directories (~/.claude/skills for Claude Code, ~/.agents/skills/ for Codex)

You write test cases (pressure scenarios with subagents), watch them fail (baseline behavior), write the skill (documentation), watch tests pass (agents comply), and refactor (close loopholes).

Core principle: If you didn't watch an agent fail without the skill, you don't know if the skill teaches the right thing.

REQUIRED BACKGROUND: You MUST understand aegis:test-driven-development before using this skill. That skill defines the fundamental RED-GREEN-REFACTOR cycle. This skill adapts TDD to documentation.

Official guidance: For Anthropic's official skill authoring best practices, see anthropic-best-practices.md. This document provides additional patterns and guidelines that complement the TDD-focused approach in this skill.

Bare filenames in this skill refer to files relative to this skill directory unless stated otherwise.