Self Improving Skills

Self-Improving Skills

After substantial work, offer to capture it. When existing skills are wrong, fix them immediately.

After Complex Tasks

When you finish a task that involved 5+ tool calls, overcame a tricky error, or discovered a non-trivial workflow:

1. Prefer updating an existing class-level skill that was loaded or clearly governed the work; add concise procedural knowledge, pitfalls, or a reference pointer.
2. Use references/ for session-specific detail, transcripts, evidence shapes, or narrow recipes; keep SKILL.md as the class-level operating guide.
3. Create a new skill only when no existing umbrella covers the class, and name it at the class level rather than after today's issue/PR/error.
4. If the user explicitly asks to update the skill library, be active: a no-op is appropriate only when there is genuinely no workflow/style/tooling signal.
5. Focus on the procedural knowledge — exact steps, commands, pitfalls — not a narrative of what happened

During Skill Use

When following a loaded skill and finding it outdated, incomplete, or wrong:

1. Fix it immediately — don't wait to be asked
2. Make targeted edits to the SKILL.md addressing the specific issue
3. Skills that aren't maintained become liabilities

What NOT to Skill-ify

• One-off solutions or project-specific conventions (use CLAUDE.md or rules)
• Standard practices well-documented elsewhere
• Anything enforceable with a hook or script (automate it instead)