I recently gave a version of this talk at AI Engineer Europe in London. What follows is the fuller story — what we found when we looked at thousands of skills, what goes wrong, and how to fix it.
You know that scene in The Matrix? Neo gets a spike in the back of his head, they upload kung fu directly into his brain, and he just... knows it.
That's what a skill is for an AI coding agent. You write a markdown file — a SKILL.md — and the agent loads it when the task matches. Suddenly it knows your team's deployment process, or how your API handles pagination, or that you never use semicolons.
It's not code. It's context. Procedural knowledge, injected at the right moment.
The thing is — Neo's upload worked perfectly. Ours? Not always.
