create-skill

Skill Creator

This skill provides guidance for creating effective skills.

About Skills

Skills are modular, self-contained packages that extend your capabilities by providing specialized knowledge, workflows, and tools. Think of them as "onboarding guides" for specific domains or tasks—they transform you from a general-purpose agent into a specialized agent equipped with procedural knowledge that no model can fully possess.

What Skills Provide

1. Specialized workflows - Multi-step procedures for specific domains
2. Tool integrations - Instructions for working with specific file formats or APIs
3. Domain expertise - Company-specific knowledge, schemas, business logic
4. Bundled resources - Scripts, references, and assets for complex and repetitive tasks

Core Principles

Concise is Key

The context window is a public good. Skills share the context window with everything else you need: system prompt, conversation history, other Skills' metadata, and the actual user request.

Default assumption: You already have significant capabilities. Only add context you don't already have. Challenge each piece of information: "Do you really need this explanation?" and "Does this paragraph justify its token cost?"

Prefer concise examples over verbose explanations.

Set Appropriate Degrees of Freedom

Match the level of specificity to the task's fragility and variability:

High freedom (text-based instructions): Use when multiple approaches are valid, decisions depend on context, or heuristics guide the approach.

Medium freedom (pseudocode or scripts with parameters): Use when a preferred pattern exists, some variation is acceptable, or configuration affects behavior.

Low freedom (specific scripts, few parameters): Use when operations are fragile and error-prone, consistency is critical, or a specific sequence must be followed.

Think of yourself as exploring a path: a narrow bridge with cliffs needs specific guardrails (low freedom), while an open field allows many routes (high freedom).