Skills turn a ritual into a command
Nearly every skill on this machine is a postmortem with a name
Wiring a new data source into an assistant’s memory took nine steps. It was done six times in one night. On the sixth, step four was skipped, and the source silently never refreshed.
The next morning the nine steps became a skill: a named procedure the agent loads and follows, so step four cannot be skipped again.
A skill is a markdown file with a trigger phrase and instructions. The agent loads it when the request matches. That is the whole mechanism, and it is enough to turn any repeated ritual into something with a name, an order, and a checklist.
What skills exist here, and the lesson each encodes
| Skill | What it does | The incident behind it | |---|---|---| | gist | Summarize the session from the conversation alone | Coming back from a break and re-investigating everything is expensive | | preflight / postflight | Snapshot the green state before a risky change; re-verify after, including deploy freshness and a second-model review | You cannot tell what a change perturbed without a before | | push | Commit in groups, check once, push, merge, deploy, verify, update the board | Half-finished work across sessions is its own failure | | ship / health | Deploy one app, or check all of them, verifying content not status | The misleading 200 | | housekeep | Orchestrate the audits: unpushed repos, port collisions, registry drift, ghost worktrees | Drift accumulates invisibly between explicit checks | | repo-audit | Find repos with no remote | Work with no remote is one disk failure from gone | | secrets-audit | Verify every secret follows the one allowed prefix | A naming convention that is not checked will drift, and here drift is a security tier | | wt-rebase / ext-rebase | Catch every worktree and sibling repo up to main, aborting on anything ambiguous | Long parallel sessions leave branches stale | | rescue | Independent diagnosis from the other model | Two failed attempts | | skill-new | Scaffold a new skill and register it for both agents | If you keep doing it by hand, package it |
When to write one
The signal is the third time. The first time you do something by hand, it is a task. The second, a pattern. The third, you are paying attention cost to remember an order of operations that a file could hold. The skill-scaffolding skill exists so that writing one takes two minutes, which is what makes the third-time rule cheap enough to follow.
Keep them honest
A skill that encodes a process is as trustworthy as the last time the process was checked. The review wrapper that went silent for a week was invoked by a skill; the skill was fine, the tool under it had broken. Skills that call tools should occasionally be asked to find a planted problem, the same as any checker.
Rituals live in files, not in memory. Every skill here is an incident that decided not to happen twice.