Composable Skills

The best skills are small and narrow enough that they're useful for many different types of tasks.

Try to follow the time-tested Unix philosophy of "do one thing and do it well." If you have a massive skill, consider breaking it up into a few more reusable ones.

Bad:

• cracked-engineer-god-mode

Better:

• run-ci
• connect-to-database
• pr-review

To give a more concrete example, I could create a gitstuff skill that goes like this:

1. Review the current working directory for any changes, and call attention to any issues.
2. If there are no issues, stage the changes.
3. Commit the changes with a conventional commit message, no more than one sentence long.
4. Rebase onto `main`, resolve any conflicts, and squash all my commits into one.
5. Push to a new feature branch in the format `myname_three_word_description`.
6. Create a draft pull request with the same name as the branch, and a body that includes a bullet point list of the changes, and any relevant issue links.
7. Sign off the PR body with `pr drafted by ai slop cannon`.
8. Request a review from Allan (he has nothing better to do).

Or I could break this up into a few smaller skills:

• review – Reviews the current working directory for any changes, and calls attention to any issues
• commit – Stages and commits changes with a conventional commit message, no more than one sentence long
• sync – Rebases the current branch onto main, resolves conflicts, and squashes
• publish – Pushes to the feature branch and creates a PR for Allan

Now if I (or my agent) want to use one part of the workflow, we can. And the best part is, I can still make the full skill as well. But I don't rewrite the same instructions, just have a high-level skill that references the smaller skills in order!