A well-written Skill is a short workflow your agent can run over and over. The trick is knowing what belongs in the Skill, and what belongs in the connected Topic.
Skill = the workflow.
Topic = the knowledge behind it
Keep that split clean and your Skills stay easy to reuse, easy to update, and easy for your team to trust.
Writing your instructions
Focus on the process, not the content.
A good Skill tells the agent what to do and how to do it - the actual knowledge it needs lives in the connected Topic.
A few tips:
Describe the steps the agent should follow
Point to the standards you want it to respect (structure, tone, checklist)
Reference the connected Topic instead of pasting long examples into the instructions
Keep one Skill per workflow - smaller Skills are easier to reuse and update
Example - SEO Writing Skill instructions
Imagine you want an agent that helps your team write SEO articles.
Your Skill instructions might include:
Follow our SEO writing process
Use our preferred article structure
Include relevant examples
Follow our internal quality checklist
Connected Topic could contain:
Best-performing blog posts
SEO research
Competitor examples
Keyword research
Content guidelines
Update a Skill
You don't need to rewrite the Skill every time something changes.
Just update the connected Topic:
Add new Snippet to your Topic
Remove outdated Snippets
Add new examples
Update team knowledge
The next time your agent runs the Skill, it uses the latest available context.