A good skill has one job.
That's what I learned the hard way. Imagine you have added a skill that analyzes logs and then turns them into a bug ticket, and then you ask: “Here are the logs. Analyze the logs, and you fix the bug.”
The evidence looks familiar. It is logs, after all. The skill analyzes them already; *how different can fixing the bug be? Quite different, actually. *
Τhe skill was designed to turn the provided evidence into a ticket. It was not designed to inspect the repository, identify the root cause, modify the code, or verify the fix.
Chapter 5 of Claude Code Beyond the Prompt focuses on boundaries.
You need to define what your skill should do and what it should not do:
- Some work belongs to the skill and should happen every time.
- Some work may be reasonable, but only after the user agrees.
- Some work belongs somewhere else.
Otherwise, your skills grow and take on tasks they aren't designed for. When responsibility drifts, output quality degrades. That is the part of skill design that is often overlooked.
Get Claude Code Beyond the Prompt at Packt Publishing:
https://www.packtpub.com/en-us/product/claude-beyond-the-prompt-9781807782290
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