| name | author-durable-skill |
| description | Write an approved site skill so it survives small UI changes and fails loudly when it does not — handles, assertions, provenance. |
Author a durable site skill
Writes one approved skill into the target plugin. Read
references/durability-doctrine.md first — this skill is its application.
Inputs
An approved line from notes/skill-roster.md, the observation note it came from, and
the profile.
Steps
-
Name it for the question it answers, in the site's own vocabulary. Frontmatter
description ≤140 characters, trigger-rich: the nouns and verbs the user will
actually say.
-
State the route and the session assumption in the body: which browser route,
whether a signed-in session is required, what the skill does when it is not there.
-
Write the identity assertion first. Before extracting anything, confirm the
page is the one asked for — canonical URL, title, echoed identifier — and classify
the body (real page, challenge, login wall, empty shell). Never infer success from
a status code.
-
Reach the data by the highest rung available, and write the instruction as a
description a person could follow. Put selectors in the profile as dated hints,
never inline as the definition of the target.
-
Never write a coordinate. Interactions are expressed as "find the element
whose accessible name is X, then act on it" — resolved at run time. A pixel
position, an offset from a screenshot, or an index into a list that can reorder is
a defect, not a shortcut.
-
Give it a fallback ladder — one durable handle, then the next, and an explicit
give-up. Two ways in beats one clever selector.
-
Define the breakage signature. What the skill says when the site has moved:
CHANGED: <what> not found at <where>. It must never return a partial result as if
it were complete, and any script must exit non-zero.
-
State the limits. What the skill does not cover, what is not on the page,
whether the values are account-specific.
-
Add the provenance block:
## Provenance
Observed on <YYYY-MM-DD> from <note>. Handles: rung <n>. Fragile: <any rung 6–7>.
Re-verify with `drift-probe`.
-
Run it once against the live site and confirm it returns what the observation
note says it should. An unrun skill is a draft.
-
Send the draft to the skill-durability-auditor agent and fix what it flags
before committing.
Notes
Batches: author related skills together so they share one profile read and one
vocabulary, but run and audit each individually.
