2.5 KiB
Solve First, Then Skill-ify
#concept
Summary
The core method both HR interviews teach: don't build a skill speculatively — solve the task with the AI once, correct it until the output is right, then say "now create a skill from this." The skill freezes a proven workflow, not a guess about one.
Current Understanding
The recurring beginner mistake is writing the skill first and then trying to "shove it somewhere." The working loop is: do your real task through the AI → watch the result → correct it → freeze the final state into a reusable skill. Two trigger heuristics exist in the corpus:
- Eugene: turn any correction loop longer than ~3 messages into a skill.
- Konstantin: auto-create a skill after >5 tool calls on a task (the hermes curator variant).
The payoff goes beyond reuse: a packaged skill is a handoff and de-risking asset — "a person with not even a third of your HR experience can deliver a decent result," which cuts onboarding and lets the expert take a vacation. This is how skills-as-memory gets populated in practice — the method side of that architecture, and the fix for "don't teach the AI abstractly."
Evidence
- "You first solve a task with Claude; the moment you reach the final solution, you say — now create a skill from this"; ~3-message heuristic — 2026-07-14-yulia-interview.
- Do-the-task-then-freeze framing; skill-as-handoff to a junior hire; vacation/de-risking angle — 2026-07-14-nina-interview.
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5-tool-calls auto-creation heuristic and curator pruning — 2026-07-14-skills-based-on-git.
- Skills prescribed specifically as the workaround for cross-session memory loss, and as the constraint on drift — 2026-07-21-larysa-interview.
Related Pages
- Concepts: skills-as-memory (the architecture this method feeds), levels-of-ai-usage (skills are the top practical rung), personal-ai-operating-system, leave-less-room-for-imagination (why a proven spec beats a written-ahead one)
- Entities: eugene, nina, konstantin, larysa
Contradictions / Uncertainty
- Whether the resulting skill is personal IP or employer work product is unresolved (Eugene vs sebastian) — 2026-07-14-nina-interview.
Next Questions
- What does a good "create a skill from this" prompt look like — does the corpus contain a concrete example transcript?
- How do the ~3-message and >5-tool-call heuristics compare in practice; is one strictly better for non-programmers?