Dev's 3 criteria for good AI agent skills: easy to trigger, short body, actually works
lxfater · x · 2026-10-17
Developer lxfater lays out three criteria for a good agent skill: it should be easy to trigger (hard now with hundreds of skills installed), keep a short body (skills eat context and a full context degrades model performance, so writers must know model knowledge boundaries), and actually do the work (design the architecture to prevent skipping steps or laziness, like fetching 2 of 10 requested news items). Most skills fail these tests and just waste context, he argues—better to disable skills and paste plain instructions.
Related event: Developer argues hand-written Agent skills beat AI-generated ones(2 posts)→
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