writing-skills

To create Claude Skills using a test-driven approach, establish a failing-test baseline, author the minimal skill to pass it, and track rationalizations through red-green-refactor cycles. This ensures reliable documentation and frontmatter correctness before deployment.

Progressive disclosure in skill authoring is a structural pattern that keeps core triggering conditions and patterns in the main file while placing heavier references in separate files. This ensures reliable skill documentation without overwhelming the baseline context.

To validate Claude Skill changes before deployment, apply pressure scenarios, rationalization tables, and meta-testing patterns. This verification process checks frontmatter correctness and confirms the skill handles baseline failures and post-deployment checks reliably.

You should document a technique as a Claude Skill when you need to enforce explicit verification steps for a specific pattern or process. This skill-writing process helps structure the technique for discovery with required YAML frontmatter and triggering conditions.

The limitation of test-driven skill authoring is that it requires maintaining a strict red-green-refactor workflow and explicit countermeasures to new rationalizations. If your technique does not require strict validation or progressive disclosure, this structured approach may be unnecessary overhead.