Building Skills From Patterns

Skills are reusable SKILL.md files. This meta-skill tells the agent to promote repeated muscle memory into a named skill: research once, encode the workflow, reuse forever.

When to trigger

• The user has asked for the same sequence three or more times (e.g. “always run lint then tsc then test before commit”).
• The agent notices it is re-deriving the same steps on every task in this repo (e.g. “how we deploy preview branches”).
• A correction sounds like a policy (“never use raw SQL here — always the repository layer”) — pair with suggesting-cursor-rules if it should be always-on; use a skill if it is a procedure with steps.

Workflow

1. Name the pattern

Choose a short slug (lowercase, hyphens): verifying-api-before-merge, releasing-mobile-build, etc.

2. Draft SKILL.md

Create .cursor/skills/<slug>/SKILL.md (or in this repo’s pattern, copy from resources/<slug>/SKILL.md when contributing upstream).