best-practices
Installation
SKILL.md
Best Practices
Answer two questions from current sources: what's the recommended way, and what bites people (the gotchas and pitfalls around it). A how-to without its pitfalls is half an answer.
Two-Phase Rule
- Phase 1: Research. Dispatch find-docs and/or WebSearch queries.
- Phase 2: Synthesize and act. Starts only after Phase 1 results arrive.
The user's argument may be a question or an imperative. Imperatives ("refine X", "set up Y") determine what Phase 2 does, not whether Phase 1 happens. Phase 1 always runs.
Rationalizations that precede skipped research:
| Thought | Reality |
|---|---|
| "I already know this" | Training data goes stale. Config keys get renamed, APIs get deprecated. |
| "The user said to act" | The imperative scopes Phase 2, it does not eliminate Phase 1. |
| "This is a simple lookup" | A 30-second search costs nothing. A wrong recommendation costs a debugging round-trip. |