Project Development Methodology

This skill covers the principles for identifying tasks suited to LLM processing, designing effective project architectures, and iterating rapidly using agent-assisted development. The methodology applies whether building a batch processing pipeline, a multi-agent research system, or an interactive agent application.

The unit of work for this skill is the whole project or a multi-stage pipeline. Individual tool design (descriptions, schemas, error messages) belongs to tool-design. Per-skill activation routing belongs to the corresponding skill plus the corpus index. This skill owns the project-level questions: should you build this with an LLM at all, what shape should the pipeline take, what does it cost, how should it be iterated.

When to Activate

Activate this skill when the unit of work is a whole project or pipeline:

• Deciding whether an LLM is the right primitive for a task at all (task-model fit before any code).
• Shaping a multi-stage batch or agent pipeline (acquire / prepare / process / parse / render).
• Estimating tokens, dollar cost, and timelines for an LLM-heavy project.
• Choosing between single-agent and multi-agent at the project level.
• Structuring agent-assisted iteration (where the agent helps build the project itself).
• Designing structured output at the pipeline contract level (cross-stage handoff format).