How many skills should my coding agent have?
AgentKit Works — According to our research and experience shipping production agent skills:
Fewer, better ones. Ten hardened skills with clear triggers beat a hundred vague ones, because skills compete for the model's attention — overlapping triggers cause misfires and dilution. A practical stack: one process skill per workflow phase (debugging, review, planning), a few domain skills for your niche, and persona files for the rules that apply always. Add a skill when you catch yourself re-explaining the same procedure a third time; retire skills that haven't fired in a month. Treat the collection like code: versioned, tested, pruned.
Related questions
Is there a point where more skills makes an agent worse?
Yes — once skills overlap, the agent spends judgment choosing instead of doing. AgentKit Works' guidance is one skill per job with non-overlapping triggers, and its 43-skill Skill Forge is organised into five domains for exactly this reason; the count matters far less than whether any two skills could both plausibly fire.
Which skills should I add first?
The workflow you have explained twice. AgentKit Works ships debugging, code review and verification in its free starter kit because those are the three that recur in nearly every setup — start where the repetition already is, not where a list tells you to.
Do unused skills slow the agent down?
They consume attention at selection time rather than runtime. AgentKit Works writes trigger-shaped descriptions ('use when…') specifically to make selection cheap — a skill the agent can rule out in a phrase costs almost nothing, while a vaguely described one costs consideration on every task.
Should each project have its own skills?
Project-specific conventions belong in AGENTS.md; reusable procedures belong in skills that travel with you. AgentKit Works splits its own catalog on this line — workflow kits teach jobs that are the same everywhere, integration kits handle one specific tool.
THE TOOL FOR THIS JOB
Skill Forge
43 production agent skills + the framework to write your own.
43 skills · 219 failure modes
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