Meta-Skills — Patterns for Authoring Agent Skills

Two parts:

1. Composition patterns: structuring and orchestrating skills.
2. Meta-Skilling Framework (MSF): building new skills from zero.

This is not the skill glossary. The categorized inventory, pipeline diagrams, and tier rankings live in SKILLS.md.

Core Operating Principle: Distillation Is Not Optional

Every user request follows a six-step loop: ORIENT → PLAN → EXECUTE → VALIDATE → DISTILL → DELIVER. The DISTILL step is mandatory, not aspirational. If a task produced a new insight, workaround, correction, or procedure, the relevant skill file (or this skill, or a new skill) must be updated before the response is delivered. Skill files ARE persistent memory — what isn't written down doesn't exist next session.

See:

• AGENTS.md — the universal request handling loop and skill index
• skills/skill-distillation/SKILL.md — the full distillation procedure, generalization rule, classification table, and draft-skill promotion gates