This is my take on how to not write slop.

One thing we learned the hard way: shorter rules work better. We started with a 600-line comprehensive guide and the agent actually got worse. Every token in the skill competes for context window space with your actual conversation. Once we cut to under 200 lines per skill, consistency went up significantly.

The semantic vs pragmatic function split in this post is a good frame. I am not sure agents need that level of abstraction explained to them though — what they actually need is concrete examples. "Use pdfplumber not PyPDF2" beats "prefer minimal semantic functions" every time.

I will, often go back, after the fact, and ask for refactors and documentation.

It works. Probably a lot slower than using agents, but I test every step, and it is a lot faster than I would do it, unassisted.

Good content tho!