Skill Authoring Checklist
A shared rubric for judging and improving an individual agent skill, offered to fill what the source calls the missing piece of the skills ecosystem: there is "no shared framework for looking at a skill and making it better," so people can't tell a good skill from a bad one and don't get the results skills promise ("skill hell"). The checklist has four pillars, applied in order both to write a skill and to audit an existing one:
- Trigger — how the skill is invoked, and the user-vs-model decision it forces (Skill Invocation Trigger).
- Structure — the internal layout: steps +
reference, and keeping
SKILL.mdminimal (Minimal Skill Surface). - Steering — getting the agent to actually do what you want, chiefly via Leading Words and, where needed, Step Isolation for leg work.
- Pruning — a final smallness pass hunting DRY violations, sediment, and no-ops (Skill Pruning).
The rubric is domain-agnostic authoring craft, distinct from the vault's composition/reuse cluster: Skill-Driven Loop Development is about pre-validating skills before looping over them and Reusable Workflow Library/Agentic Distribution about cataloging and sharing them — this checklist is one altitude lower, about the internals of a single skill.
Claims
- A skills ecosystem needs a shared rubric to distinguish good skills from bad; absent one, users can't reliably get the promised results. observation — the source's framing of the gap; the value proposition of having any checklist, not a proof a particular one is optimal.
- Audit and authoring use the same four-pillar sweep — trigger, structure, steering, pruning — run in order. best practice — context: reviewing or writing a skill; the ordering puts invocation and layout before wording and cleanup so late passes aren't wasted on soon-to-be-restructured material.
- The framework is itself shippable as a runnable skill
(
/writing-great-skillsin the speaker's repo) you can run over your own and community-authored skills. observation — external, groundable claim about a named artifact; reproduced as the source's, flagged for grounding, not verified here.
Related
- Skill Invocation Trigger — pillar 1.
- Minimal Skill Surface — pillar 2 (structure + smallness).
- Leading Words — pillar 3's core technique.
- Step Isolation — pillar 3's leg-work lever.
- Skill Pruning — pillar 4.
- Agentic Simplicity — the parent discipline the whole rubric serves: a skill earns every word it keeps.
- Skill-Driven Loop Development — the adjacent cluster one altitude up: validate skills, then loop over them; this checklist is about a single skill's internals.
- Distillate: Building Great Agent Skills: The Missing Manual