Writing Your First Skill

Module 2, Skills & Memory | Essay 5 of 8

Writing a skill isn't a technical task. It's the same thing you'd do if you were explaining a process to a capable new colleague: describe what needs to happen, in what order, and what good looks like at the end.

A skill has four parts.

Name: What you call the skill. Short, specific, action-oriented. "Weekly team update" or "Client follow-up email" or "Meeting notes."

Purpose: One sentence on what this skill does and when to use it. "Use this skill to draft a weekly update to my team covering progress, blockers and next steps."

Instructions: The steps the agent should follow. Written in plain language. As specific as you need to get consistent results. Include formatting preferences, tone guidance, what to include and what to leave out.

Output: What the final result should look like. Length, format, structure.

Here's a real example:

Skill: Weekly team standup summary

Purpose: Draft a weekly summary for my team covering the past week's progress and the week ahead. Send every Friday afternoon.

Instructions:

1. Ask me for three to five bullet points on what got done this week
2. Ask me for the top two or three priorities for next week
3. Ask if there are any blockers or things the team should know about
4. Draft a summary using those inputs, casual tone, plain language, no jargon
5. Keep it under 200 words
6. End with one sentence of encouragement

Output: A short email-style update ready to paste and send. No subject line needed.

That took about five minutes to write. Run it once, refine it once, and you've got a skill that saves time every Friday for as long as you're doing standups.

The first run is the test. Activate your skill on a real task and see what the agent does with it. If something's off, update the instructions. Skills improve quickly with one or two rounds of refinement.