Designing and Building Skills
A good agent skill is a small piece of information architecture: the right scope, a clear trigger, well-structured instructions, and only the knowledge the task needs — all shaped by the context-window discipline of post 2. Building one is less about clever prompting and more about thinking like a technical writer and a software designer at once. This post is the practical craft of designing and building a skill that an agent uses reliably.
Building a skill is information architecture under a context budget. Scoping to one coherent capability, structuring it (sharp trigger, clear prescriptive instructions, curated knowledge, deferred depth), writing for the agent as a capable-but-uninformed reader, and iterating empirically while pruning ruthlessly.