skill-design-principles

Design principles for creating high-quality skills require a narrow activation scope targeting a single task, actionable guidance, practical checklists, and concrete examples to ensure practical usefulness.

Hard guardrails in skill design are CI or hook-enforced constraints, while soft guardrails provide designed guidance that requires human judgment during skill creation and evaluation.

Review existing skills by checking that no hard guardrails are embedded in content, verifying the activation scope targets a single domain, and evaluating against a concise checklist for actionable guidance.

Hard guardrails should be avoided within skill content because they belong as CI or hook-enforced constraints, while skill content should focus on soft guardrails and designed guidance requiring human judgment.

When creating a new skill, you need to define a narrow activation scope targeting a single task, provide concrete examples, and include a concise checklist to guide both creation and evaluation.

Yes, you can use practical checklists to evaluate skill design principles during reviews, ensuring skills maintain task-specific scope, actionable guidance, and proper separation of soft and hard guardrails.