I manage a dev team, and we've been running Claude Code daily for months. I built a set of custom skills for us — code review, a debugging protocol, our team conventions — and the biggest lesson I learned surprised me:
The body of your skill barely matters if the description is wrong.
The failure mode nobody warns you about
Here's what happens to most developers who discover skills. They get excited, write a detailed 200-line SKILL.md encoding everything they know about code review... and then it never triggers. Not once. They conclude skills "don't really work" and go back to re-typing the same prompt every session.
The skill was probably fine. The description killed it.
