Skill Development

Resolve Skill Scope

Resolve each in-scope skill through Skill Installation before planning, including during reviews and audits. Apply the consuming project’s instructions rather than assuming that source location determines installation reach.

For documentation work, including assets, catalogs, metadata, public READMEs, and references, compose with agent-documentation. It owns the shared lifecycle for authority, ownership, writing composition, changes, reviews, validation, and reporting. Add the contracts selected below without restarting that lifecycle. For script-only work without documentation changes, follow the script route directly.

An explicit change takes precedence when the request also uses review or audit language. Standalone reviews and audits remain read-only. Apply the global Explicit user direction policy to this skill’s authoring conventions and procedures, including routed contracts. A procedural waiver doesn’t change a script’s implemented capabilities or bypass native access controls. Select every applicable contract before starting the work it governs, and load each once.

Select Contracts

• Documentation: When authoring, reviewing, auditing, or maintaining skill documentation, follow Skill Authoring for entrypoints, references, overlays, examples, and inherited policy.
• Descriptions: When authoring or assessing a skill’s description or invocation mode, follow Skill Descriptions.
• Public behavior: For every public skill or canonical public-surface asset in scope, follow Public Skill Portability. Also follow it for every public mirror or standalone default affected by a global instruction change or evaluation, even when the request names only the global source. Select its conditional creation, promotion, naming, and optional peer contracts before the corresponding work. Its README contract applies when creating or updating a public skill README.
• Public catalogs: When maintaining a public skill catalog or its collection README, follow Maintain Public Skill Catalogs.
• Script contracts: Before planning a new or changed skill-owned script, adjacent contract test, or script-owned artifact, or reviewing or auditing one, follow Skill-Owned Scripts. This skill owns necessity, canonical ownership and location, observable interfaces, operation modes, effects, artifacts, schemas, invocation, and contract coverage. The owning domain skill supplies domain semantics, and applicable implementation workflows govern internal concerns.

Keep Skill Contents Operational

Never document auxiliary information anywhere in a project-authored skill directory. Auxiliary information records how the skill itself was authored or maintained without helping a reader understand or execute its advertised workflow. Examples include change histories, research logs, review records, and verification baselines. Keep durable context in the source project’s reference documentation and task-local evidence in the conversation or task artifacts outside the skill. Preserve operational requirements, safety boundaries, and supporting explanations needed to apply the skill.

Validate Selected Contracts

For documentation work, use agent-documentation’s Select Validation Scope to determine applicable checks. Run identity checks for skill creation or changes to names or discovery. Run installation and link checks for creation or changes to installation mappings, paths, or links. Apply those checks when their contracts are under review or audit, and select other checks from the affected contracts. Validate complete declared scopes, including affected mirror families and the full description set when required. Conditional loading doesn’t limit an invariant to changed lines or excuse skipping validation of an unchanged declaration covered by the active contract.

For documentation work, return the skill-specific results to agent-documentation’s shared validation and reporting lifecycle. For script-only work, complete the script contract’s validation and report concrete contract findings or the resulting change and any limitations under the applicable communication policy. Don’t turn a contract review into an implementation audit.