Agent Skills Are the New Runbooks#

Runbooks used to be written for humans.

Now a lot of runbooks need to be written for humans and agents.

That does not mean dumping the whole wiki into the prompt. That is how you get bloated context and weird behavior.

The better pattern is Skills.

A Skill is a reusable instruction pack for a specific kind of work. It tells the agent when to use it, what resources matter, what steps to follow, what scripts are available, and what output format is expected.

A Skill is not a prompt dump#

A bad Skill says:

You are an expert support agent. Be helpful.

A useful Skill says:

• Use this when the ticket is about billing limits.
• Read these docs first.
• Check account plan and feature flag state.
• Never promise a refund.
• Draft the answer in this format.
• Escalate if the customer asks for account deletion.

That is operational knowledge.

Skills make agents less messy#

Without Skills, the main system prompt becomes a junk drawer.

It contains incident rules, support tone, code review policy, security rules, browser automation steps, output schemas, and model preferences.

Then nobody knows which instruction caused which behavior.

With Skills, the workflow loads the right instruction pack at the right time.

Skill types I would model#

Domain Skill

Product, billing, incident response, support, compliance.

Tool Skill

How to use GitHub, Slack, browser, Stripe, Linear, database read APIs.

Workflow Skill

The step-by-step operating path for a repeatable task.

Policy Skill

Permissions, approval, data boundaries, escalation.

Eval Skill

How to test this behavior and what good looks like.

Activation rules are the secret#

The most important line in a Skill is when to use it.

Examples:

• Use when a Slack request mentions deploy, incident, outage, latency, or error rate.
• Use when a customer asks about invoices, plans, credits, or usage limits.
• Use when a PR changes auth, billing, migrations, permissions, or CI.
• Use before any browser action that submits a form.

That activation rule keeps the agent focused.

Build it in Codelit#

Try this:

Build an agent workflow for customer support with Skills for billing, product help, bug triage, escalation, and policy review. Each Skill should include activation rules, resources, instructions, and eval criteria.

Build a Skills-first workflow

If prompts are the words, Skills are the operating memory.