Evolve Skill Library

Goal

Keep the skill library coherent by merging overlaps, retiring stale material, and promoting only the patterns that earn long-term reuse.

Inputs

• Current skill inventory
• Usage history or anecdotal friction
• Repeated failures, corrections, or missing patterns

Non-Goals

• Rewriting the entire library from scratch without evidence
• Expanding scope just to make the library feel more complete

Workflow

Trigger signals

• Two skills seem to overlap in scope
• A skill has not been triggered in a long time
• Users complain the library is confusing or hard to navigate
• Skill count is growing without clear value

1. Inventory the library by behavior, not by file count

List each skill's purpose, trigger, current usefulness, and nearest neighbors. Note which skills have strong evidence of repeated use and which only look important in theory. Success criteria: The library is mapped as a set of decision points, not a flat list of filenames.

2. Detect overlap, gaps, and drift

Compare neighboring skills to find duplicate triggers, missing coverage, stale assumptions, and places where a skill has started to sprawl beyond its original decision area. Success criteria: Each suspicious area is labeled as overlap, gap, or drift, so the next action is obvious.

3. Check for buried or drifting guardrails

Review whether risky behavior, approval logic, or escalation rules have drifted out of the guard layer and into general-purpose skills. Success criteria: Cross-cutting guardrail logic is either kept visible in the guard layer or intentionally referenced there.

4. Decide keep, merge, split, archive, or promote

Apply one explicit rule set to each candidate change: preserve a skill that is still distinct and useful, merge only when two skills answer the same decision, split only when one skill contains multiple decision points, archive when the pattern is no longer in use, and promote when a repeated rule has earned a skill. Success criteria: Every decision has a rationale tied to usage evidence or library clarity.

5. Re-stabilize the library shape

Update the roadmap so the next round of work preserves the library's size, coverage, and trigger clarity. Document what should remain as a skill, what should move back to a rule, and what should wait for a later version. Success criteria: The resulting roadmap makes the library smaller, clearer, or more coherent rather than just more extensive.

Output Contract

A reviewed library inventory with explicit keep, merge, split, archive, and promote decisions, plus a short roadmap for the next version.

Escalation

Pause when usage evidence is too thin, when a merge would blur distinct decision points, when a split would create tiny fragments with no real reuse, or when the library change would depend on future patterns that have not yet appeared.

Common Failure Modes

• Keeping every skill because none of them feel obviously wrong
• Merging skills that solve different decisions just to reduce file count
• Splitting a stable skill into smaller pieces that nobody will trigger
• Promoting a rule into a skill without repeated evidence of reuse

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: bikeread
• Source: bikeread/promethos
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.