Last week’s post on agent skills made the case that most AI skills underperform because they’re written as a single type of content. Task information alone. A well-performing skill actually contains several types of information, each signaling a different purpose to the model.
Below you’ll find the revision of my weekly plans skill that I use to create weekly plans for my classes that help students (and myself) know what were are doing for the week.
A few things to watch for as you read through:
The Concept block is the section most likely to be missing from skills you’ve already built. It’s also the one that does the most work before a single step gets executed.
This is where you define exactly what it is you want the AI to produce … and any other ideas that need to be defined and customized to your context.
The Principle section consolidates constraints that were scattered in the original. Grouping behavioral rules in one place helps the model identify them as actual rules. When the same rules are embedded in a procedure, its more likely that they will be conflated with tasks.
The description field in the front matter is Reference information, and it’s one of the most consequential sections in the entire file. If the skill isn’t triggering when you expect it to, that’s where to look first.
The skill itself is adapted from my Writing with Machines course and designed to be modified. If you build something from it, I’d genuinely like to know what you changed and why. That’s what makes this a lab!
Note: I used markdown for this “skill prompt” because that is what Claude typically uses. I’m thinking about testing this against an XML version in the near future.
