compact-skill-creator

Compact skill creator

Author a new skill, or improve an existing one, so it carries all its rules and intent in the least text possible. Cost has two tiers: the description sits in context every session — the skill's most expensive text — while the body loads only when the skill triggers. Both stay lean. Be interactive: gather what you need, draft, then apply only on approval.

Compaction — always via compact-docs-writer

The compaction rules — the least-text principle, the removal-audit verification, and the present-and-confirm with a measured word delta — live in compact-docs-writer, the single source of truth; this skill never restates or re-derives them. From the moment you draft (step 4) through self-review (step 5) and present (step 6), always invoke compact-docs-writer and follow its workflow on the skill text — reading it, applying its principles by hand, or naming it after a direct edit does not count. This skill adds only the skill-specific layer: trigger taxonomy, agnosticism, progressive disclosure, completion criteria, metadata, and the version-bump decision.

Trigger taxonomy — classify first

How a skill is triggered decides how its description is written. Classify into one:

• Mandatory — must auto-load whenever a task type is touched (e.g. "working on UI components", "dealing with unit tests"). A silent miss defeats its purpose, so the description spends words on a strict, concrete trigger: concrete verbs + the artifact ("when creating, editing, or reviewing …").
• Manual — invoked by name: a /command, or sibling skills/rules that reference it explicitly. The by-name reference does all the routing, so trigger wording buys nothing: the description is one short line of what the skill does — enough for a human choosing from a list — never a body summary, never a "load when …" clause. When the skill format can block model invocation (e.g. a disable-model-invocation flag), set it for Manual skills nothing invokes programmatically — the description then costs no standing context; pair the flag with type: flow — some agents hide flag-bearing skills even from manual invocation without it. When sibling skills must drive this one, keep it model-invocable and mark it "invoke manually only" in the description instead.
• Self-Evident — auto-loadable, but intent is obvious from a natural request (e.g. "fetch a ticket"). Trigger words ≈ the task name, so a short description routes correctly without a when/when-not clause.