skillify

Skillify

A procedure you repeat is a procedure worth recording once. The third time you walk the same path, pave it — write it down as a skill so the path exists for everyone after you.

Decide whether it deserves a skill

Capture it when all of these hold:

• The same flavor of task has shown up roughly three or more times.
• It has a recognizable shape: several steps that stay constant from run to run.
• It would still make sense in a different repository, not just this one.
• A fresh agent with no prior context could act on it.

Skip it when any of these apply:

• It is a single occurrence — just do the task.
• It is glue specific to one codebase — that belongs in project memory, not a shared skill.
• A skill already covers the ground — search the skills directory before adding a duplicate.

How to extract one

1. Name the invariants

Pull the pattern apart into three buckets:

• Trigger — what kicks it off (a phrase, a file type, a domain).
• Constant steps — the parts that never change between runs.
• Variable parts — what differs each time, and the shape of the result.

2. Draft the file

Keep the frontmatter to just two keys. The description does the heavy lifting: it is how the skill gets matched later, so write it in the third person and state both what the skill does and when to reach for it (and when not to).

---
name: kebab-case-name
description: One to a few sentences, third person, describing what the skill does and the
  situations that call for it, plus what it is not for. No first person.
---

# Skill Name

A short framing line — the principle behind the skill.

## When it applies
- Conditions that should trigger it
- Conditions that should rule it out

## Procedure
### 1. First action
Concrete, do-this instructions.

### 2. Next action
...

### N. Confirm it worked
How to tell the procedure succeeded.

## Guidance
A handful of rules worth remembering.

3. Put it where skills live

.aim-agents/skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md