Making a Skill Yours

An installed skill works on day one, but it works like a template. It was written for a typical small business, and you don't run a typical small business; you run yours. This lesson covers the four edits that close that gap, and the one section you should touch last.

A skill file is plain text, so editing means opening it and typing. Keep an untouched copy of the original somewhere before you start.

Swap in your real voice

Skills describe a voice; you can hand them proof instead. The support drafter asks for two or three real emails you were happy with, and the proposal writer asks for past proposals that won. Take that seriously. Two real emails teach your tone better than any paragraph describing it, so replace generic tone descriptions in the file with short samples of your own writing.

Add house rules

A house rule is a business policy the skill enforces in each draft, so you stop catching the same mistake by hand. Add them to the skill's Rules section as a short list:

Adding rules is the safest edit there is. Each one narrows what the skill can get wrong.

Cut what you won't use

Skills ship with five or six capabilities because different businesses need different ones. If you price everything as a single number, cut the options-table capability from the proposal writer. If you'd rather chase invoices yourself, delete that capability from the finance analyst. Capabilities are self-contained, so removing one doesn't break the rest, and a shorter file is easier to maintain and gives the assistant less room to wander.

Add one capability of your own

Model a new capability on the ones already in the file: a bold name, when it triggers, what it produces, and what it must not invent. Say you want the finance analyst to watch your HST set-aside:

Notice the last line. The capability inherits the skill's honesty habits because you wrote them in, the same way the originals do. Start with one addition, test it on a real month, and expand only when it holds up.

Touch Rules last, and carefully

Everything above adds or trims. The Rules section is different: it's where the skill keeps its honesty and its safety. Rules are the lines stopping the assistant from inventing prices, promising refunds it can't back, or passing itself off as a licensed professional.

The finance analyst ends each analysis by disclosing that it isn't a licensed financial advisor or accountant. That line is load-bearing. Delete it and the skill will happily produce advice-shaped output with no warning attached, and someone in your business might act on it. So the working rule: add rules freely, tighten existing ones carefully, and don't delete a disclosure or safety rule at all. A rule that feels like friction is usually protecting you from a failure you haven't hit yet.

One small edit, before and after

Here's the scale a good edit lives at. The support drafter ships with this line:

A landscaping company whose customers read replies on their phones between jobs might change it to:

One line, one reason, safety rules untouched. You changed how the skill writes without touching why it's trustworthy.

Try it now

Make two edits to your installed skill: swap in real samples of your voice, and add three house rules you find yourself repeating. Reinstall the edited file, run one real task, and compare the draft against last week's. Assistants can still make things up, and an edit that reads fine on paper can land oddly in practice, so a test task after each round of edits stays part of the routine.