Module 2 · Tools, Knowledge, Memory & Research Design · scripted
Exercise: Build a Skill
The goal: onboard one brilliant employee
You have just seen what a skill is: the folder handed to a brilliant employee on their first day. Now build a real one — for a recurring task in your own research world. Not a toy: pick something you actually do more than once and wish you never had to re-explain. Coding a transcript against your scheme. Writing the recruitment email for a study. Reviewing a manuscript with your field's checklist. Turning raw instrument output into the table your papers use. If you have explained it twice to a student, it's a skill.
What you are building
The test of success: a fresh conversation that has NEVER met you completes the task with nothing but this folder.
Where to build it
Open the Skill Builder → — an agent interviews you about the task and writes the package with you: it drafts, you correct, the files appear in the tree as you talk, and you can download the finished skill as a zip. The Agent tab shows exactly how that interviewer works, if you want to peek. Prefer an LLM of your choice? Ask it to interview you one question at a time about a task you want to package as an agent skill, then write SKILL.md plus supporting files in the standard layout — and assemble the folder yourself.
The interview, flipped
You are not writing documentation. You are being INTERVIEWED by the future employee's advocate:
Answer concretely. Every vague answer becomes a stumble on someone's first day.
Step 1 · The catalog line
Before any content: the name and the description — the one line the agent reads while deciding whether to open your folder at all. Write it trigger-style ("Use this skill when…"), and add a counter-example only if you can name the actual neighbor it disambiguates from. Then stress-test it: give the line to the Skill Builder agent (or your LLM) with three task descriptions — one clearly inside, one clearly outside, one borderline — and ask which ones it would open the skill for.
Capture — end of Step 1
Step 2 · The package
Build the body through the interview. Keep SKILL.md a genuine table of contents — pointers, not payload — and push the weight down into the folders: at least one reference (the knowledge you'd hand a newcomer), one worked example (a real input with its real finished output — examples are the facet your field most neglects), and one template with placeholders (the starting point that carries your structure). Add a script only if the task genuinely warrants one — remember the substrate: your employee has eyes and judgment, not just a shell.
Capture — end of Step 2
Step 3 · The acid test
Now the first day actually happens. Open a fresh conversation — one that has never met you — hand it only the skill and a task, and watch. In the Skill Builder, start a new chat and point it at your saved skill; with your own LLM, upload the zip to a clean session. Do not coach. Where the employee stumbles, resist the urge to answer in chat — that fix evaporates when the conversation ends. Fix the folder instead, and run the test again.
Capture — end of Step 3
Deliverable
Three captures plus the skill itself (the zip, or the folder). At the end we compare: the catalog lines read aloud as a catalog — would you know when to open each other's skills? — the interview moments that surfaced knowledge people didn't know they had, and the acid-test stumbles, tallied by facet. The tally is the point: it is a map of what our fields leave undocumented.
- Whose acid test survived attempt one? What did their folder have that yours didn't?
- What did you fix in the FOLDER that you were tempted to fix in the CHAT — and why does that difference matter for the next hundred first days?
- Look at the catalog as a whole: which two skills would an agent confuse? Whose counter-example earns its place?