A gate skill that runs before Anthropic's skill-creator. It enforces the build discipline taught in Module 2's "Skilful Skill Creation" lesson: no skill gets drafted until the workflow has been run manually at least once, every piece of proposed content is sorted into generic-knowledge (cut) vs. proprietary-opinion (keep), branches are routed to references/ instead of flattened, and deterministic steps are flagged for scripts/ instead of left to the model.
skill-creator is excellent at the mechanics: YAML frontmatter, drafting, test cases, eval loops, packaging. What it doesn't do is stop someone from feeding it a premature or bloated brief in the first place. This skill is that filter. It produces a clean, scoped, opinion-only brief — then hands off.
Trigger with: "let's make this a skill," "should this be a skill," "turn this into a skill," or anytime mid-workflow when skill-worthiness is in question.
Flow:
- Confirms a successful manual run exists (2-3x, consistent) — refuses to proceed otherwise
- Triages every piece of content: generic (cut) vs. opinionated (keep)
- Checks for branches → routes to
references/; checks for deterministic steps → routes toscripts/ - Right-sizes: one skill, one job, ~500 line ceiling on the opinion content
- Hands off the clean brief to
skill-creatorfor actual authoring
SKILL.md— the full gate logic and step-by-step flowreferences/source-script-full.md— the source script this skill was derived fromreferences/usage-examples-compressed.md— compressed usage examples