skill-author

# Skill author Turn a description of a recurring need into a **draft skill** that a human can review and approve. This skill writes proposals; it never installs, activates, or edits skills on its own — a freshly drafted skill is a proposal, not a verified capability. It is domain-general: nothing here is specific to stormwater or SWMM. The same recipe produces a skill for any modeling or workflow domain. ## When to use - A recurring problem keeps showing up and **no existing skill covers it** — the gap itself is the trigger to propose a new one. - Someone asks to "create / propose / draft a new skill" for some capability. - An agentic system (e.g. a memory or lessons-learned layer) flags a repeated pattern that warrants a new skill rather than a tweak to an existing one. If an existing skill already covers most of the need, **improve that one instead** — don't create a near-duplicate (see step 2). ## How to draft a skill 1. **Capture intent.** Pin down three things before writing: (a) what should this skill let the agent *do*? (b) *when* should it trigger — what phrases or contexts? (c) what does it *produce* (output format)? Pull answers from the conversation or the evidence you were handed; only ask the human for what's genuinely missing. 2. **Check for overlap first.** List the existing skills and check whether one already does most of this. If so, propose refining that skill instead of adding a new one — avoiding skill sprawl keeps the library discoverable. 3. **...