Agent Skills in 7 Days: Turn Experience Into Reusable Capability

What Skills Are: the SKILL.md Spec, Directory Layout, and Three-Stage Progressive Disclosure

A skill is just a folder containing a SKILL.md; get clear on its directory layout, its two required fields, and why the three stages of discovery, activation, and execution save so much context.

Writing Your First Skill: How to Write description's Trigger Words, How to Layer the Structure, How to Install It Into a Client

Start from something you already do well, and write your first skill that actually gets triggered: write description as an imperative sentence describing user intent, layer the body by steps and pitfalls, then install it into a client and confirm it really opens up.

A Design Method: Distilling From Repeated Tasks, Checklist Style vs. Reference-Manual Style, Four Anti-Patterns, and Trigger Testing

Turn writing a skill from inspiration into a method: judge whether a task is worth turning into a skill, organize content into one of two mature forms, avoid four anti-patterns, and use a set of positive and negative examples to measure description's trigger rate.

Skills With Scripts: Executable Attachments, Dependencies and Sandboxing, Cross-Platform Support, and Breaking Down Document-Handling Skills

When a skill should ship a script instead of more instructions, how to make a script's dependencies self-contained, how to design its interface for an agent, and how a document-handling skill breaks into plan, then validate, then execute.

Hand-Building a Skill Runtime: Scanning, Frontmatter Parsing, Injecting the System Prompt, Reading the Body on Demand

Actually build three-stage progressive disclosure: scan a directory to discover skills, parse frontmatter leniently, splice names and descriptions into a directory injected into the system prompt, and read the full body only on activation.

Organizing and Distributing: Plugins and Marketplaces, Versioning and Team Sharing, and the Division of Labor Between Function Calling, MCP, and Skills

Go from one person's folder to a team's capability pack: how to organize a plugin, how to publish to a marketplace, how to version it, and exactly what function calling, MCP, and Skills each handle and when to reach for which.

Capstone and Retrospective: Turning a Team's Conventions Into a Skill Pack and Driving a Subagent Through a Real Task

Combine the week's learning into one delivery: split a team's conventions document into three skills, use subagent isolation to run a real task, use an eval to prove it's actually better than going without skills, and write it up as one portfolio entry.