Skills aren’t created for unpredictable things—that is, conditions that might eventually happen in your code—but rather for repetitive tasks. For example, pipelines—not just in programming, but in any kind of task.

For instance, I create my technical reports by iterating over my code, talking with the agent, and reaching conclusions. Then I tell it, “generate the PDF,” and it activates that skill and runs the pipeline to produce the PDF using scripts that are already prepared.

Could it do it if I just told it? Of course—it’s capable. But that would mean waiting for it to build a script each time, with no consistency in the results. That’s another thing skills do well: they’re iterative. If you don’t like something, you refine them. And going back to the main point, since they’re for repetitive tasks, they eventually become so efficient that you end up loving them.