davidtoby Agent Skill Lifecycle
Use this umbrella for skill collection maintenance and agent learning workflows.
Core workflow
- Determine whether the user needs discovery, authoring, publishing, migration/consolidation, or retrospective learning.
- Search existing skills before creating new ones; prefer class-level umbrella skills with references/templates/scripts over one-session micro-skills.
- When authoring, keep frontmatter concise and trigger-rich; keep SKILL.md procedural; move detailed examples into references.
- Validate structure and names before publishing or packaging.
- When mining logs, extract durable reusable procedures, not task progress.
- For proactive/self-improving systems, define explicit triggers, buffers, review cadence, and safety limits.
Labeled playbooks
Skill discovery and installation
Use search terms based on task class and domain synonyms. Prefer broad skills that cover the workflow family.
Skill creation
Follow progressive disclosure: SKILL.md for core workflow; references/ for long domain notes; templates/ for starter files; scripts/ for deterministic helpers.
Repository publishing
Update source skill, rebuild package artifacts, refresh README/package lists, and handle stale package conflicts with explicit git status checks.
Session-log recall
Use logs to recover previous decisions, commands, and errors. Condense stable lessons into skills/memory only when they are reusable.
Ontology and structured memory
Use typed entities and links when long-running projects need queryable structure beyond plain text memory.
Proactive agent patterns
Use working buffers, WAL/progress logs, autonomous cron boundaries, and user-visible summaries to avoid hidden runaway behavior.
Tool pitfalls
skill_manage.patch escape-drift on quoted text
If skill_manage(action='patch') returns Escape-drift detected, the old_string/new_string likely contains JSON-escaped quote artifacts such as \" that do not exist in the file. Do not work around by broadening the patch blindly. Re-read or inspect the target text, then retry with literal quote characters (") in the Python/JSON string value rather than backslash-prefixed quote text in the matched content.
Reference files
Demoted narrow skills with repository-specific or session-specific procedures live in references/from-*.md.