New work with skills en

New Work with Skills

Your Prompt in combination with an Agent is the new unit of work.

A practical guide to working with Agent Skills across increasing levels of mastery.
See references/levels.md for full detail on each level.

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Quick Map of Levels

Level	Title	Core Idea
1	Understand & Use Skills	A HowTo for Humans is a Skill for Agents
2	Save Single Work as a Skill	Capture sessions — don't let work get lost
3	Organize Your Skills	Git repos, flat folder, license, group freely
4	Continuous Skill Improvement	Live updates while you work
5	Skill with Special Techniques	Role skills, evolving state, TDD for skills
∞	This is the End of the Beginning	To be continued…

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Level 1 — Understand Skills and Use Skills

A HowTo for Humans is a Skill for Agents and Humans.

• What is a Skill: https://agentskills.io/specification
• A Skill can use other Skills → Skill Tree
• Care about Context Size: Read a Skill in 3 Steps
  See: https://agentskills.io/what-are-skills#how-skills-work

The 3-Step Reading Pattern (Context-Efficient)

1. Discovery — Agent loads only name + description (~100 tokens per skill)
2. Activation — When task matches, agent reads full SKILL.md body
3. Execution — Agent loads referenced files or executes scripts only as needed

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Level 2 — Save Single Work as a Skill

The Problem: You worked on something. Your session ends. Your work is lost.

Old Solution: Save a summary as a .md file manually.

New Thinking: At the end of your session, use this prompt:

For this session write me a Skill named <my-new-skill> using
https://github.com/roebi/agent-skills/blob/main/skills/create-agent-skill-en/SKILL.md
Output is a Zip file ending with .zip that I can download.
It contains the new Skill and all its related files.

This turns every working session into a reusable, shareable, versioned Skill.

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Level 3 — Organize Your Skills

• Store skills in one or more git repositories
• In a git repo, only a flat skills/ folder is allowed — no nested skill folders
• Group by whatever fits: your team, your projects, your company
• License your skills — use the license frontmatter field
  → Consider writing a dedicated skill-licensor skill for consistent licensing

my-skills-repo/
└── skills/
    ├── my-skill-a/
    │   └── SKILL.md
    ├── my-skill-b/
    │   └── SKILL.md
    └── new-work-with-skills-en/
        └── SKILL.md

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Level 4 — Continuous Skill Improvement

You work in your project git repo using an Agent, with your skills in a parallel folder <my-skills>.

While you work, when you notice a skill needs updating or extending, use this prompt pattern:

Update/Extend in the Skill <my-skill> this <whatever needs to change>.

This keeps skills alive and evolving alongside your actual work — without interrupting your flow.

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Level 5 — Skill with Special Techniques

See references/special-techniques.md for full detail.

5a — Skill is a Role

Old Thinking: Agent has Roles. Agent uses Skills.

New Work Thinking:

Your Prompt + Agent → Let write a Skill that IS a Role,
using its own Skill, which may use other Skills.

The Role Skill can act as:

• Mentor — guides the process
• Safeguard — validates decisions
• Process Guard — enforces workflow

The Agent is reduced to pure EVA execution (Execute, Validate, Advance).

5b — Skill Having Evolving State

Instruct your Skill to output an evolving work result state .md file.

Loop:

1. Skill reads your prompt + the evolving state file
2. Skill processes
3. Skill writes a new evolved state file

Repeat until the evolving work result state matches your expectations.

5c — Skill Until Requirement is Fulfilled

Think Test-Driven Development — implemented with Skills.

Write a Skill in generic form. Then combine it with:

• A simple Skill
• A Skill that is a Role (5a)
• A Skill having Evolving State (5b)

The skill loop runs until the defined requirement is fulfilled.

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This is the End of the Beginning

To be continued…

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Author: Robert Halter, Switzerland
Version: 2.0
Date: 2026-03-10
License: All rights reserved by author.