Concise Guide to Writing Effective Agent Skills (from SkillsBench paper)
Define procedural focus:
- Deliver how-to guidance only – workflows, standard operating procedures (SOPs), domain conventions, and heuristics for a class of similar tasks (not factual recall or single-instance solutions).
- Include exact API calls, function names, parameters, step-by-step sequences, output-format reminders, and at least one concrete working example.
Ensure reusability and portability:
Use required structure:
- Place everything in a modular directory containing SKILL md (natural-language instructions with YAML frontmatter for name and description) plus optional resources (code templates, executable scripts, reference docs, or worked examples).
Keep focused and concise:
- Skills must be accurate, internally consistent, clear, specific, and error-free; expert-written skills drive the percentage gains while self-generated ones deliver no benefit.
- Limit to 2–3 core modules or procedures per skill/task; detailed or compact guidance outperforms exhaustive/comprehensive documentation.
Make it actionable:
- Write for file-system use across agents; avoid any task-specific leakage (no test-case constants, filenames, or paths).
Prioritise human curation and quality:
Is GPT-5.6 to arrive with stronger safety checks? The below message appeared from a discussion in ChatGPT saying it required more time to check.
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The real question is whether they’ll actually make it public. 🤔
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Sounds like GPT-5.6 is going to be much better at front-end development. It's about time.
I'd love to see a Codex Design tool just like we have Claude Design.
5.6 and 5.6 Pro are rumoured to be next Thursday atm. Could we also get Sonnet 5 and Gemini 3.5 Pro?
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Kol Tregaskes
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Kol Tregaskes
An updated Claude Mythos is on the way. No surprise - Anthropic keeps iterating, just as it does with the rest of the lineup. Odds are it’ll be Mythos or Fable 5.1. A jump to 6 only really makes sense if Sonnet or Opus also move to version 6.
