AI Guides › Skills & Agents
Auditing Your Installed Skills Once A Quarter — What To Keep, What To Delete
By Nigel Guy · 2 min read
Skills accumulate quietly. You install one for a task, it works, you forget
about it, and six months later you've got a library of tools you don't
remember the details of, some of which are quietly out of date with the
platforms they connect to. Nobody notices until one of them breaks in a way
that costs something.
The rule: review your installed skills on a fixed cadence, not when
something breaks — a quarterly audit catches rot before it costs you
anything.
The mechanism
- List everything installed, not just what you remember using. The
forgotten ones are exactly the risk this audit exists to find.
- For each one, ask: have I used this in the last month? If not, either
there's a good reason (seasonal, occasional) or it's a candidate for
removal.
- Check whether the tools it depends on have changed. An API update, a
platform redesign, a renamed field — any of these can silently break a
skill that used to work fine.
- Re-read the guardrails section, if it has one. Does it still match
how you're actually using it, or has the use case quietly expanded beyond
what the guardrails were written for?
- Delete, don't just ignore, anything that fails this check. An unused
skill isn't neutral — it's an untested, possibly-rotted piece of
automation sitting in your library.
What to skip
Skip auditing weekly — that's more overhead than the risk justifies for
most personal use. And skip keeping a skill "just in case" once it's failed
the audit twice running; if you haven't needed it in six months, rebuilding
it later is cheaper than maintaining it indefinitely.
Guardrails
- Anything with write access or agent-style autonomy deserves this check
more often than passive, read-only skills — the cost of rot is higher.
- A skill you built yourself is just as subject to rot as one you installed
from elsewhere — don't exempt your own work from the audit.
- Deleting a skill you're not using is reversible in spirit — you can always
rebuild it if the need comes back. Keeping an unmaintained one running is
the riskier default, not the safer one.
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