Prompting Skills

The prompt-* family designs, improves, and validates the prompts used throughout the skill system. These skills are meta-tools — they operate on prompts, not on product code.

Skills

Skill ID	Description	Model Class
prompt-engineering	Designs new prompts from scratch: system message, user message, output format, stop tokens	cheap
prompt-chaining	Builds multi-step prompt chains where each step’s output feeds the next	cheap
prompt-refinement	Iteratively improves an existing prompt based on failure analysis or eval scores	cheap
prompt-hierarchy	Designs a prompt hierarchy: system → instruction → user layers with clear override rules	strong

When to Use

Situation	Skill(s)
Building a new AI feature’s prompt	prompt-engineering
Chain of thought requires multiple steps	prompt-chaining
Prompt is producing inconsistent results	prompt-refinement
Complex multi-layer prompt system	prompt-hierarchy

Instructions That Invoke These Skills

• prompt-engineering — primary consumer; all four coordinated
• evaluate — uses prompt-refinement after eval scores reveal weaknesses
• govern — uses prompt-hierarchy to enforce policy layers

Prompt Engineering Output

prompt-engineering produces a full prompt specification:

system: |
  You are a senior TypeScript engineer. You produce clean, typed, testable code.
  Follow ESM conventions. Never use `any`. Use `zod` for runtime validation.

user_template: |
  Implement a function that {{task}}.
  Requirements: {{requirements}}
  Constraints: {{constraints}}

output_format: typescript_fenced_codeblock
temperature: 0.2
max_tokens: 2048
stop_tokens: ["```\n\n"]

Prompt Refinement Loop

Initial prompt → eval-prompt score
      ↓
prompt-refinement  → identify failure mode
      ↓
Modified prompt → eval-prompt re-score
      ↓
Repeat until score ≥ threshold