Agent skill · bfollington
authoring-skills
Use when writing, revising, or judging a skill. A skill is a packet of wisdom that changes how a situation is seen, not a procedure to follow — dense, composable, and worth loading. Trigger on creating a new skill, editing an existing one, deciding whether something should be a skill at all, or reviewing a set of skills for bloat and overlap. Do NOT use for the mechanics of the skill file format, or for ordinary documentation.
What it needs
About 3k tokens when loaded.
What this skill does
Authoring Skills A skill is not instructions. It is an index card of crystallized wisdom — the principle distilled, with just enough specifics woven in that it lands. The measure: does reading it change how the situation is seen, before anything is done? A skill that only tells an agent what steps to take has failed, because an agent that needed the steps will follow them badly and one that did not needed nothing. Aim at intuition, not compliance. The good skill produces the way the user is talking about this makes me want to think like this. Say the thing that is not already known Most of what could be written in a skill, a capable agent already knows. Restating it costs context and teaches nothing, and — worse — dilutes the parts that are not obvious until nothing stands out. So the test for every line: would this have been done anyway? If yes, cut it. What remains is the actual content: the reframe, the non-obvious ordering, the failure mode that is invisible from inside, the distinction that dissolves a confusion. This is why skills get shorter as they get better. The first draft contains the subject; the final draft contains only what is surprising about it. One subject A skill answers one question and fires in one kind of moment. When it needs "and also", it is two skills, and both are weaker for the merge — the trigger becomes vague, and the reader gets one relevant half and one irrelevant one. Skills exist at many altitudes and all are legitimate: specific knowledge, specific practice, mental models, techniques, principles, abstract processes. What they share is not scope but density. They are index cards in a network, not chapters in a manual. Written to compose — because two loading together should sharpen each other rather than repeat. Where one skill's subject genuinely adjoins another's, name the neighbour and let it own its half rather than restating it badly. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills bfollington/authoring-skills