Writing Skills

I write skills as behavior interventions — each one solves one named failure mode. Skills are organized into buckets (engineering/productivity/misc/personal), public skills indexed in plugin.json and README, personal skills kept local.

Process

1. Gather requirements — ask about:

   • What failure mode does this skill prevent?
   • What specific use cases should it fire on?
   • Does it need executable scripts or just instructions?
   • Any reference materials or real examples to include?

2. Draft the skill — create:

   • SKILL.md with terse instructions (target: <150 lines for most skills)
   • Trigger phrase in the YAML description ("Use when…")
   • One explicit anti-patterns section (failures I've seen)
   • Additional reference files only if SKILL.md would exceed 100 lines