Skills Worth Building
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Skills Worth Building
The most useful skills I’ve built are the ones that compress a multi-step review or creation process into a single invocation. A few examples from what I actually use:
draft-reviewer — takes a piece of writing, checks it against voice guidelines (from VOICE.md), flags AI slop patterns, checks reading level, identifies weak reasoning. What used to be a manual checklist across four separate concerns is now one command. The skill applies the same standards consistently every time.
morning-brief — gathers calendar events, pending tasks, emails requiring action, and recent progress from daily notes, then produces a formatted briefing. I run this each morning. The underlying skill knows which calendars to check, which task lists to query, how to format the output for my Obsidian daily note.
content-pipeline — takes a raw idea or source material and moves it through research, drafting, and review stages, with subagents handling each stage in sequence. I don’t touch it until there’s a reviewable draft sitting in my inbox folder.
mail-triage — categorises incoming email by type (action needed, FYI, invoice, noise), extracts any invoices, flags things that need a response, and writes a summary to the daily note. What used to take twenty minutes of inbox management takes about ninety seconds of review.
These skills didn’t spring into existence fully formed. Each one started as a manual process I was doing repeatedly, got codified into written instructions, then got refined over several runs until the output was consistently useful.