Skill Creator

This skill provides guidance for creating effective skills.

About Skills

Skills are modular, self-contained folders that extend Bub's capabilities by providing specialized knowledge, workflows, and tools. Think of them as "onboarding guides" for specific domains or tasks, they transform Bub from a general-purpose agent into a specialized agent equipped with procedural knowledge that no model can fully possess.

Skill Location Policy

When creating a skill, place it in one of these two roots:

1. Project-local: $workspace/.agents/skills/<skill-name>
2. Global: ~/.agents/skills/<skill-name> (shared across workspaces)

Prefer project-local by default. Use global only when the user explicitly wants the skill available across multiple workspaces.

What Skills Provide

1. Specialized workflows - Multi-step procedures for specific domains
2. Tool integrations - Instructions for working with specific file formats or APIs
3. Domain expertise - Company-specific knowledge, schemas, business logic
4. Bundled resources - Scripts, references, and assets for complex and repetitive tasks

Core Principles

Concise is Key

The context window is a public good. Skills share the context window with everything else Bub needs: system prompt, conversation history, other Skills' metadata, and the actual user request.

Default assumption: Bub is already very smart. Only add context Bub doesn't already have. Challenge each piece of information: "Does Bub really need this explanation?" and "Does this paragraph justify its token cost?"

Prefer concise examples over verbose explanations.

Set Appropriate Degrees of Freedom

Match the level of specificity to the task's fragility and variability:

High freedom (text-based instructions): Use when multiple approaches are valid, decisions depend on context, or heuristics guide the approach.