Why skills
The gap between what you need to do and what you already know is where dragons live.
The skill consumer
You have a goal
You have an outcome that you're looking for. You may not have all the tools and skills to achieve it.
Discovery is broken
Tutorials are generic, outdated, and out of context. They don't refer to what you are trying to accomplish. They lack nuance — happy case only.
Skills don't scale
Knowledge is trapped, work is duplicated, no vetting, hearsay knowledge vs. canonical knowledge, difficult for experts to update on the fly. Can't react to conditions on the ground.
The skill producer
Experts don't scale
New skills are needed faster than they can be produced. Support costs quickly swamp expert resources. Nonlinear processes are hard to model. Feedback is difficult to solicit.
Lifetime 80/20 rule
Over the lifetime of a piece of software 80% of the cost goes to maintenance. Only 20% is spent on initial creation. The same is likely true for skills.
Markets are risky
Knowledge is trapped, work is duplicated, no vetting, hearsay vs. canonical knowledge, difficult for experts to update community in response to feedback, events can instantly invalidate existing knowledge.
The trust gap is real
The plumbing exists. The trust layer doesn't.
How skills work
You ask for help
The agent encounters a task that needs specialized knowledge.
Agent finds the skills
You don't need to know a skill exists. The agent dynamically queries the skill library as needed.
Solution applied
The right skill is found and loaded just in time from the skill library for the agent to use.
The trust model
Trust
Trust who you know. Fork the project. Run your own library. Vet skills with your team. The trust boundary moves from a public to the people, tools, and context you know.
Curate
Skills can be created, continuously validated and refined without constant human intervention.
Share
Create, consume, contribute back. Knowledge moves to where it is needed when it is needed. Experts can focus on creating solutions instead of controlling support costs.
Experts create skills.
People find and use them easily.
Skill markets can be trusted.