Step 3 of 5

Scoping: One Skill, One Job

Decide where one skill ends and the next begins.

A skill should do one job well. When a skill tries to cover several loosely-related tasks, its description blurs, its triggering degrades, and its body becomes a maze of conditionals.

Signs a skill is doing too much

  • The description needs "and" more than once to explain what it covers.
  • Half the body is "if the user wants X, otherwise if they want Y…".
  • Two very different requests both load it, and each only uses part of it.

Split by job, then let descriptions cross-reference each other with explicit boundaries. Two sharp skills beat one blurry one every time.