Skill Writing

Package reusable decisions that improve an agent's work. Scale effort to the request; a wording fix does not need a redesign.

Establish the task

Read repository instructions and neighboring skills. Honor the requested or implied project location before using the host's default skill directory.

Identify intended requests, observable results, inputs, tools, and boundaries. Ground decisions in completed tasks, corrections, runbooks, schemas, or fixes. Choose one coherent capability; identify missing domain evidence rather than inventing expertise. Ask only for missing information that changes implementation.

• Create: extract a reusable method, specialized knowledge, or reliable automation.
• Improve: inspect existing instructions, resources, callers, and examples. Establish an objective: correctness, clarity, brevity, or changed requirements. Make the smallest coherent change, consolidate obsolete rules, and preserve unrelated metadata, invocation policy, and working behavior.
• Review: report actionable findings with file references; edit only when fixes are requested.

Distinguish observed failures, suspected problems, and unmeasured improvements.

Design discovery and context

Write a specific name and description explaining capability and activation in the user's terms. Check neighboring skills for name collisions and overlapping triggers; different names alone do not resolve overlap. Add meaningful boundaries and report unavoidable overlap.