Your skills are WAY TOO LONG

YouTube · Watch/Read · (gathered 2026-10-14)

• Matt Pocock argues that “skills” (instructions for AI agents) are often “enormous, absolutely outrageously huge,” making them inefficient and difficult to manage.
• People tend to treat language in skills differently from code, being “scared to touch someone else’s language” and fearing it might be “load-bearing” or “magical,” leading to constant appending rather than editing.
• Excessively long skills are harder to audit, maintain, and compose, often containing “sediment and duplication,” which ultimately obscures the desired model behavior and hinders performance.
• The practical takeaway is to treat English as malleable as code: “ruthlessly edit” and condense skills to be as concise as possible, focusing only on the agent’s desired behavior and output, to achieve better results.