Skills

Skill design patterns — writing, auditing, and improving the reusable instruction files that give AI agents their capabilities.

4 articles

The Edit tool fails when old_string no longer exists. For dates, timestamps, and counters that update repeatedly, sed is the right tool.

Extracting workflows buried in config docs into structured skills makes them triggerable, testable, and independently improvable.

Most orchestrator agents default to spawning subagents for everything. The overhead only pays off on tasks that won't fit in one session.

Auditing 20 agent skills surfaced undertriggering descriptions, missing persistence, stale docs, and duplicated boilerplate. Here's the pattern.