What Is a Skill?
Module 2, Skills & Memory | Essay 4 of 8
Memory is what your agent knows about you. A skill is what it knows how to do for you.
More precisely: a skill is a saved set of instructions for a task you do repeatedly. Instead of figuring out the best approach every time, you figure it out once, write it down, and your agent follows it consistently from then on.
Think about the tasks that show up in your work week after week. A standing meeting that always needs notes formatted a certain way. A type of email you write regularly, follow-ups, introductions, updates to the same audience. A weekly summary that always covers the same categories. A document review that follows the same checklist.
For each of these, you currently figure out the right prompt every time you do it. Or you've landed on a prompt that works and you copy-paste it from somewhere. Either way, you're doing repetitive work that doesn't need to be repetitive.
A skill makes it automatic. You describe the task once, what it's, what steps to follow, what the output should look like. Save it. The next time you need it, you activate the skill instead of rebuilding the instructions.
The difference between a skill and a saved prompt is depth. A prompt is a single instruction. A skill is a workflow, it can have multiple steps, decision points, reference materials, and quality checks built in. A skill for writing a client update email might include: check the tone guidelines, lead with outcomes not activities, flag anything that needs client action, keep it under 150 words. That's not a prompt. That's a process.
Skills also represent institutional knowledge. The best way your team runs a certain type of meeting, formats a certain type of report, responds to a certain type of customer situation, that knowledge usually lives in someone's head. A skill captures it. New team members get your best practices on day one. Everyone produces consistent outputs regardless of who's doing the work.
You don't need to know anything technical to write a skill. The next essay covers exactly how.
Pod Exercise: List three tasks you do every week that always follow roughly the same pattern. For each, write one sentence describing what a skill for it would do. These become your skill backlog.