Skills
Skill design patterns — writing, auditing, and improving the reusable instruction files that give AI agents their capabilities.
4 articles
- Edit Tool Fails the Second Time the Same Field Gets Updated — Use sed Instead The Edit tool fails when old_string no longer exists. For dates, timestamps, and counters that update repeatedly, sed is the right tool.
- Turn Your Agent's Standing Procedures Into Skills Extracting workflows buried in config docs into structured skills makes them triggerable, testable, and independently improvable.
- When to Farm and When to Just Do the Work Most orchestrator agents default to spawning subagents for everything. The overhead only pays off on tasks that won't fit in one session.
- What a Skill Audit Actually Finds Auditing 20 agent skills surfaced undertriggering descriptions, missing persistence, stale docs, and duplicated boilerplate. Here's the pattern.