Refine

Make one skill clear and sufficient for a capable agent. Review deletion first; preserve what quality depends on. Whole-skill restructuring is in scope, combining multiple skills is not. Discuss in the user's language.

1. Establish the intended result

Read the target's instructions and linked templates, references, and scripts. Infer its intended output, essential constraints, and quality criteria from the skill, available accepted examples, and user feedback. Execution records can help but are not required. Do not confuse today's inputs with reusable requirements.

When intent or conflicting requirements would change the rewrite, propose an interpretation and ask a focused question. Ask before changing the purpose or essential quality criteria unless the user has already authorized that change. Keep the existing name unless renaming is requested or agreed.

2. Refine the whole skill

Keep a recoverable baseline and prepare the revision separately. Find the shortest sufficient process for the intended result. Review deletion, merging/shortening, and revision before adding instructions. Remove repeated or irrelevant guidance and implementation detail a capable agent can decide; preserve non-obvious domain knowledge, fragile operations, and essential exceptions.

For each step, retain necessary inputs, decisive constraints, and what completion looks like. Keep required user decisions and permissions, without inventing extra approval gates. Reorganize the whole structure when it improves clarity; do not rewrite sound instructions merely for stylistic uniformity.

Inspect resources before removing or changing them. Bundle only what the revised skill needs, using relative paths; do not hide excess prose in supporting files. Reuse or derive needed templates from accepted artifacts. Ask for a missing resource only when it cannot be faithfully reconstructed. Make incidental values inputs. Choose languages and tools for the task, without adding unnecessary dependencies.

3. Check what changed

Check the revision against the original purpose, essential requirements, metadata, and referenced resources. Retain meaningful checks and their invocation in the skill; add missing evaluation only where it measures actual quality. Instruct the skill to run checks before delivery, report failed or untested criteria, and present concrete review questions only for judgments code cannot establish.

Match verification to the impact of the edit. Clear wording or duplicate removal may need only a requirements comparison. Changes to behavior, templates, or code need relevant checks and representative examples, including rare affected cases. Use comparable task conditions if claiming better execution quality or efficiency. Do not weaken acceptance criteria to make the revision pass. Distinguish structural cleanup from measured behavioral improvement; agent judgment is not human approval.

4. Deliver the revision

Apply a supported revision without overwriting unrelated edits. If a material requirement or necessary quality judgment remains unresolved, retain the candidate separately and ask for the specific missing decision. If nothing useful needs changing, keep the original.

Report the significant deletions or revisions, what was verified, and any remaining human review.