Agent Skills Series (7): Making Your First Skill? Diagnose Your High-Frequency Pain Points with the "Selection Wizard"

📌 Series Introduction

If you already agree that “standards shouldn’t be repeated verbally in every chat” (see Part 1), understand how to write and install a SKILL.md (see Parts 2 & 3), and even know the three golden rules of what deserves a Skill (see Part 4), the next practical question is: In your specific business scenario, what is the very first Skill you should prioritize building?

🔍 Why It Is Hard to Define Your First Skill

Starting is always the hardest part. When first introduced to Agent Skills, we often fall into two extremes:

1. The Fantasy of Completeness: Trying to write an “all-in-one development standard Skill” that crams code style, Git commits, API definitions, and testing standards into a single file. The result is a description that is too broad, causing the model to trigger constantly when not needed, or selectively ignore key rules due to context overload.
2. The Blank Slate of Hesitation: Feeling that your project is “too simple” to need any formal standards—until you find yourself repeatedly typing corrections in daily chats because the model used the wrong package manager, put files in the wrong directory, or made mental math errors during reconciliations.

A good Skill must meet three criteria: repetitive, stable, and actionable. However, because everyone’s role, system, and pain points are different, the “digital assets” most urgently needed for solidification are completely unique to each individual.

To help you diagnose quickly, we have condensed our topic-selection experience, official build guides, and creative extensions for non-technical scenarios into the “Skill Selection Wizard” interactive tool below.

🛠️ Online Diagnosis: Skill Selection Wizard

Please make your selections below based on your actual work role and environment. The wizard will calculate and generate a customized Skill recommendation checklist in real-time, which you can export as Markdown with a single click.

🚀 How to Take the First Step with Your Recommended Checklist

The wizard categorizes recommended Skills into three priority levels based on your selections:

• P1 (High Priority): This is your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for the week. They usually correspond to high-frequency pain points where you find yourself repeatedly typing corrections.
• P2 (Medium Priority): These can serve as your next-stage iteration goals, or you can place them as large reference materials inside the references/ directory.
• P3 (Low Priority): Ideal as supplementary guidelines for progressive disclosure as your team scale expands or system complexity grows.

1. Skills First, Code Later

If you are starting a new project (Greenfield), do not wait until the project is finished to write a README. Before writing your first line of code, draft and install the 2-3 high-frequency Skills recommended by the wizard (such as team defaults and scaffolding standards). This will save you a massive amount of team communication and model correction tokens.

2. Narrow Over Broad, Use-Case Driven

When drafting your first SKILL.md, keep the main text between 50 to 100 lines. The most critical part is writing a precise description.

• Bad Example: description: "Help with frontend development" (Too broad; triggers on any frontend task and wastes context).
• Good Example: description: "Use this skill when creating a new list page or table component in this project" (Extremely narrow; triggers only when building list pages).

3. Leverage references/ for Progressive Disclosure

Do not cram verbose API specs, complete error code tables, or hundreds of lines of design tokens into the main text of SKILL.md. Toss them into the references/ directory, and write only indexes and rules for “when to read which file” in the main file. The model will automatically fetch these thick documents when needed, keeping your daily chat context clean.

🎨 Expanding the Boundaries for Non-Technical Roles

In the “Idea Bank” at the bottom of the wizard, we have listed many highly valuable ideas for non-technical roles like marketing, sales, founders, and creators.

Non-technical Skills follow the exact same “narrow description + trigger testing” logic. For example, a creator’s “Video Script Playbook Skill” should have its description written as Trigger when writing or editing video scripts for the tech column. This way, when you ask the model to help write weekly reports or daily emails, it will never annoy you with a video script tone.

Solidify those “brand voices,” “forbidden terms,” and “proposal required fields” that you have to remind the model of every single time. Let them become the digital assets of your solopreneurship or daily office workflows.