self-learning

Self-learning: harvest golden paths into skills

This skill turns something you just figured out the hard way into a reusable Agent Skill, so the next session — yours or a teammate's — starts already knowing the proven route instead of rediscovering it from scratch.

It is a meta-skill: it doesn't do the work, it captures how work got done.

Recognize the moment

Watch for these signals during normal work. Any one of them is a cue to harvest:

• A task only worked after several attempts, wrong turns, or a correction from the user. The successful path is worth more than the failures around it.
• You discovered project-specific facts the agent didn't know up front: where creds/env vars live, which selector or backend talks to a service, a non-obvious command, a required sequence, a gotcha that defies the obvious assumption.
• It's an operational workflow likely to recur: reach the dev/prod DB, deploy, run migrations, seed data, verify a change live, run one specific test path, rotate a key, tail the right logs.
• The user signals it explicitly: "remember this", "save this as a skill", "don't make me re-explain this next time".

Act on the cue immediately — don't ask for permission first, whether the user requested it or you noticed it yourself. Harvest the skill, then tell the user what you captured and where (step 5). They can always edit or delete it.

Skill, memory, or skip?

Not every lesson deserves a whole skill — triage first, so you don't bloat the skills list with one-liners:

• A multi-step, reusable procedure or workflow (how to deploy, reach the DB, run the migration dance, verify live) → harvest it as a skill using the procedure below.
• A single standalone fact or one-line correction (an env var name, a path, one gotcha) → if your harness has a lightweight memory/notes facility (e.g. a MEMORY.md index), record it there instead; a whole skill is overkill for a one-liner. With no such facility, make a small skill.
• A genuinely one-off thing unlikely to recur → skip it.