~/blog/tag/skills
Skills
The smallest unit of teaching an agent something it cannot infer. What Skills are, how to write them, and where they fall apart.
What I write about here
A Skill is a small, named bundle of instructions that an agent loads on demand. Not a tool, not a plugin, not a prompt template. Closer to a piece of institutional knowledge written down so the agent can read it the next time it needs to.
The framing matters. A Skill is what you reach for when the agent keeps doing the same thing wrong and you keep correcting it the same way. Write it down once. Let the agent invoke it next time. That's the whole idea.
The posts under this tag look at Skills the way I look at any tool. What they're good at, where they leak, and what people get wrong when they reach for one. I write Skills for myself a lot. Some hold up. Some get rewritten three times before they stick. The patterns I keep coming back to are in these posts.
Read these expecting opinions, not just walkthroughs. A Skill that solves the wrong problem cleanly is worse than no Skill at all.
// Best entry points
- Superpowers: Teaching Claude Code to Think Before It Types
The clearest case I have written for why Skills work. Built around a real plugin, with the patterns that survived being used in anger.
- Getting the Best Out of Claude Code
Where Skills slot into a working setup. Less about the abstraction, more about which Skills earn their place and which get in the way.
Superpowers: Teaching Claude Code to Think Before It Types
Out of the box, Claude Code starts writing immediately. Superpowers forces it to plan, test, and verify first. On structured workflows, TDD enforcement, and why discipline beats speed.
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