DESIGNING A SKILL

Summary from the TLDR Design newsletter

Agent skills can be treated like apps whose interfaces happen to be written largely through instructions, with both the human invoking the skill and the AI interpreting it acting as users. Building a polished skill requires many familiar design practices, including finding the right form, refining copy, creating a visual system, anticipating repeated use, offering meaningful customization, and testing across different contexts. Precise instructions matter because agents fall back on familiar patterns when given vague directions, making skills a useful place to encode the context, trade-offs, intuition, and taste that individual prompts cannot reliably communicate.