writing-great-skills

What it does

• Front-load the skill's leading word — the description is where it does its invocation work.
• Cut identity that's already in the body. Keep the description to triggers, plus any "when another skill needs…" reach clause.
• "fast, deterministic, low-overhead" -> tight — one quality restated across a phase — into a single pretrained word (a tight loop).
• "a loop you believe in" -> red — converts a fuzzy gate into a binary observable state (the loop goes red on the bug, or it doesn't).
• Duplication — the same meaning in more than one place. Costs maintenance and tokens, and inflates a meaning's prominence on the ladder past its real rank.
• Sediment — stale layers that settle because adding feels safe and removing feels risky. The default fate of any skill without a pruning discipline.

Requirements & configuration

• Cut identity that's already in the body. Keep the description to triggers, plus any "when another skill needs…" reach clause.
• Push too little down and the top bloats; push too much and you hide material the agent actually needs. That tension is the whole decision.

Configuration: GLOSSARYSKILL