Agent skills stopped colliding after the author added explicit anti-triggers

teagaw · reddit · 2026-07-24

The author found that adding anti-triggers to agent skills fixed a collision problem that happened when multiple skills could match the same command.

A deploy skill and a git-workflow skill kept both firing on words like “deploy.”
The solution was to add explicit “do NOT trigger on …” boundaries to each skill.
With those exclusions in place, the inconsistency disappeared.
The post argues that skills compete not only on what to do, but on what not to do—and that agents will guess unless you define the boundaries clearly.

The author says they expanded the pattern into exercises and examples in an ebook on agentic engineering.

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