Author a skill that is born conformant. A scaffolder writes the valid skeleton and the linter gates the result, so the process stays deterministic end to end. Spend the saved judgment on the one stochastic part, the wording of the procedure itself.

The depth of that wording (invocation choice, descriptions, the information hierarchy, completion criteria, leading words, pruning, and the failure modes) lives in the authoring guide. Read the guide before writing the body. See also the foundation doctrine, whose rules this skill assumes.

Steps

Choose the invocation. Decide model-invoked versus user-invoked from the trade-off in the authoring guide: a model-invoked skill pays permanent context for the ability to fire unprompted, while a user-invoked one costs nothing until the human summons it. Completion: you have named the invocation and, for model-invoked, drafted a description under 500 characters that opens with the job's verb and lists "Use when …" triggers.

creating-skills

Steps