There's a quiet assumption baked into how most teams build agent skills right now: that the person who writes the SKILL.md file should be a developer. On the surface it makes sense. Skills live in .claude/skills/ or ~/.openclaw/skills/, they carry YAML frontmatter, and they get committed to a repo. That's developer turf.
It's also why so many agent skills are quietly mediocre.
The person who actually knows the workflow you're trying to encode (the support lead who knows how a refund really gets processed, the ops manager who knows the ten steps before an invoice goes out, the researcher who knows which sources to trust) is almost never the person editing the YAML. So a developer writes a plausible-looking skill from a secondhand description, and you get a skill that reads well and does the wrong thing in the cases that matter.
The intent gap, one level up
If you've followed the debate about AI and documentation, you've seen the argument that code can't capture intent. Skills have the same gap, one level up. A skill isn't code, it's procedural knowledge: the sequence, the judgment calls, the "if the customer is enterprise, do this instead." That knowledge lives in the heads of the people doing the work, not the people who happen to own the repo.
