Skill-Driven Development: Transferring your Craft to AI Agents

Every project has its own way of doing things — migration patterns, transaction handling, deployment quirks, that one PDF template workflow nobody wants to touch. I've been writing this stuff down as markdown files with helper scripts so my AI agent can follow along. I've taken to calling this skill-driven development (building on agent skills , the open standard that originated at Anthropic and is now supported across most AI coding agents). This post walks through some skills I've put together and shows the feedback loop that makes them worth maintaining. What skills add over a README A project README or an AGENTS.md can capture conventions. The skills I've been writing try to go a bit further: Progressive disclosure — a slim main file loads first, with detailed references pulled in only when needed. This keeps the agent's context window focused. Composability — skills declare dependencies and load together. A Django skill + a project overlay skill + a TDD skill compose into a comple