danielrosehill/To-Skill-Or-Not-To-Skill

A user-level heuristic for AI agents: before starting a task, ask whether it should
become a skill.
Skills and plugins are defined patterns of work, and their value is cumulative. The
current pace of AI development is chaotic partly because there is so much to define.
Workflows are being written for the first time on top of tooling that, until
recently, did not exist. Agents are now very good at writing skills and plugins
themselves, so it costs little to ship the workflow you need. The leverage is in
noticing that a task should be captured at all.
This repo gives you that habit in three forms:
a snippet for the user-level instruction file of whatever agent you use
(CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, GEMINI.md, …), so the lens is always on;
a skill, skill-or-not, that runs the full checklist on demand ("I think this
is replicable, run the checklist");
an installer that propagates the snippet into every agent you have.
## The heuristic
For every task:
1. Is it repeatable? The shape of the task often answers this. When it doesn't,
check history: memory, past sessions, shell history, the repo.
2. Can it be automated or assisted with tools available now? That means MCP,
APIs, browser use, the shell, or written guidance. Partial automation counts, and
the bar for yes is deliberately low.
3. Is it already in our library? In theory, skill discovery makes this step
moot, because a relevant skill should surface on its own. In practice, search
before you conclude it is missing.
4. Has someone else written it? If a third-party skill fits as-is, add it to
your third-party collection as a pointer to the upstream. If it is close, use it
as the base for your own.
5. Otherwise, create it. Add it to your public or private plugin, deploy it, and
validate it by running the task you were about to do as a one-off.
A "no" at step 1 or 2 means you just do the task.
The same text is a habit in Habits-Of-Claude, which is its source. Use either one, not both.
The exact text injected into instruction files is in
snippet/heuristic.md. The step-by-step version is in
skills/skill-or-not/SKILL.md.
## The setup it assumes
The heuristic pays off most with a library that is easy to add to and easy to search:
Several plugin collections ("marketplaces", although nothing is for sale):
a public one for everything that can be open-sourced;
a private one for skills that carry personal or business detail;
a third-party one that holds pointers to other people's plugins, pinned to a
ref and never copied.
Progressive discovery of tools and skills, so the agent finds what is relevant
without everything loading up front.
User-level configuration, so habits follow you into every project.
Federated access to tools through a single gateway, rather than per-project
server lists.
## Why user level, not project level
The heuristic governs how an agent works in general. It is not about any one
codebase. In a project's CLAUDE.md it would apply only inside that repo, and every