When AI skills started popping up everywhere, my first impulse was to collect them like browser extensions. But treating skills like plug-and-play software misses a fundamental truth: a skill isn’t just a package; it’s a piece of someone’s thinking. In the real world, relying on someone else’s knowledge is never the same as using your own head. You can read someone’s notes or memorize their checklist, but until you understand the principles yourself, you can’t adapt when things go sideways. AI skills operate on that exact same principle.
Every time I sit down to write code using an agent, the goal is simple: get things done quickly, but not compromise code quality or ignore best practices. At the beginning, I tried making tasks work using published skills. I spent time trying skills from public repositories by Anthropic, Microsoft and Google as well as some community repos (e.g. Matt Pocock’s). Using out-of-the-box skills rarely produced the desired result for me. Even when the name and description sounded perfectly like what I needed, once the agent started working, it was following the original author’s assumptions, shortcuts, and trade-offs.
My initial reaction was to go to the other extreme: write all my skills from scratch. But that comes with its own hurdle. It takes a lot of time, and it’s often hard to know where to even begin. Translating the intuitive, tacit understanding that already lives in your head into finely tuned instructions for an agent is a long, demanding process.
In practice, the most effective path is often in between: read through existing public skills, understand the logic under the hood, and improve them to your liking. Or even better, merge parts from a few off-the-shelf skills into a new one tailored to your exact workflow.
Skills don’t replace your domain knowledge. They don’t eliminate the need to know what a good solution looks like. All they do is encode your mental model into the agent—eliminating the frustration of having to micromanage it with repetitive follow-up instructions.
Off-the-shelf skills are like books on a topic: useful references, but they don’t always solve your exact problem to your satisfaction. A skill you refine yourself gives an agent your own understanding, judgment, and style, so it actually works the way you would do it. Of course, if your strategy is just delegating your job to other people, go right ahead and use their skills—or their agent.