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Overview

Section 4 · Agent Skills — Package know-how so any agent gets it right without being re-taught.

6 lessons.

By the end of this section you can

  • Write a SKILL.md whose description actually triggers when it should.
  • Decide whether a piece of knowledge belongs in a rule, a skill, a hook or a CI gate.
  • Audit a skill library for the smells that make skills worse than nothing.
  • Keep skills portable across agent tools instead of locked to one product.

What Are Agent Skills?

beginner · ~10 min — You have typed the same instruction to an agent twice before.

Anatomy Of A SKILL.md

beginner · ~12 min — A skill that fails almost always failed in one of two places.

Writing Good Skills

intermediate · ~15 min — A skill that reads well and changes nothing is worse than no skill at all, because the agent now performs confidence about a procedure it only half-follows.

Skill Quality And Anti-Patterns

intermediate · ~15 min — Skills are instructions that an agent follows with confidence. That makes a bad skill more dangerous than a missing one: the agent does not hedge, it executes.

Managing A Skill Library

advanced · ~15 min — Five skills is a folder.

Skill Exercises

intermediate · ~25 min — Reading about skills does not produce a library. These three exercises do, because each one forces a skill out of a procedure you already perform but have never written down.

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