Skills as process
Definition: a skill is a reusable process written down in language. It is words and markdown, and it carries across agents and harnesses. Both speakers in 2026-10-05-youtube-poteto-software-factory land on this.
[1:01:12] lauren-tan: “A skill is really just process. At the end of the day a skill is just English or language. It’s just markdown.”
The host frames a skill as “processes turned into words” (1:00:16), and closes on what, if anything, is magical about them (1:04:49): “If there is any magic in them, it’s the words chosen and the phrases used, the thinking done to turn abstract process into language. Once that thinking has been done it’s on the surface and you just nick it.”
Encode the workflow, drop the commands
The part she adds (1:03:47): “As agents get more capable, think of skills as encoding workflows. Skills from last year were more about implementation details, like here are the exact script commands you should use. With the latest models you can just delete those parts and focus on the workflow. Over time we’ll see skills get smaller and smaller, more compact.” The skill becomes a series of steps. The exception is the deterministic core, which belongs in a script rather than in prose. See determinism-extraction.
Mine your own transcripts
The way to write a skill, as the host’s tip and endorsed by Tan (1:00:40): “You go and look at your previous transcripts and mine for information. Look through your own prompts to the agents where you correct them, where you have to constantly intervene, and take that higher-level learning and turn it into a reusable skill so that agents stop repeating that mistake.” The host calls past chats “a treasure trove of context, because that’s the process materialized. It’s not an abstract idea in your head, it’s the actual thing” (1:02:41). Her pstack recall skill is exactly that workflow collapsed to one step (1:03:02), born while doing virtualization in the Cursor app, where she kept needing the good context from the last chat in each new one.
This loop is also the vault’s own rule that repetition becomes a skill, see how-this-garden-is-organized: the second time the same shape of work is asked for, extract it into a skill with a deterministic exit.
Your own set of knives
Because a skill is language, it is malleable and portable (1:01:27): “Everyone should have their own set of knives. Every chef, when they go to a different restaurant, brings their knives with them. Trust is really about trust in your own tools.” She suggests combining the host’s grill-with-docs or wayfinder skill with pstack’s execution skills, or reading both and making your own. “Skills are so malleable, you can do anything you want, it’s just language” (1:04:40). See environment-and-constraints for what the tools are built into.
Related
- determinism-extraction: the deterministic part of a skill belongs in a script
- agent-verification-skill: the highest-value process to write down
- environment-and-constraints: skills are one of the constraints you shape
- wet-not-dry: why writing the process out in words repeats what a shortcut would link