skill-authoringlisted

# Skill Authoring — easy-cheese conventions This document codifies the skill-authoring rules for easy-cheese, drawn from obra/superpowers (CSO principle, Iron Law template, pressure-test gate) and Matt Pocock's skills repo (size budget, authoring checklist). It is the canonical reference for anyone adding or revising a skill. --- ## Description rule (CSO) The description is the **only thing the harness shows the model when choosing a skill**. Optimize it for triggering, not explanation. **The rule:** sentence 1 = capability; sentence 2 = "Use when [triggering conditions]". No workflow summary, no pipeline-position prose, no feature list. Rationale: a description that summarizes the skill's workflow creates a shortcut the model takes *instead of reading the SKILL.md body*. The skill then silently degrades to its own one-line description. **Constraints:** - Maximum 1024 characters (Codex rejects longer descriptions). - Third-person, present tense. - Triggering conditions name concrete phrases the user might say. **Test:** strip the description and ask: could a model choose *this* skill over all others based on these words alone? If not, the triggers are missing. --- ## Size budget Keep SKILL.md bodies lean. The goal is a body a model can read in one pass without losing the thread. **The budget: 3,600 estimated tokens** for the SKILL.md body (frontmatter excluded). At this repo's measured prose density that's roughly 150 lines, but tokens are the gated unit, not line