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Naming A Skill So Future You Understands It In Six Months

By Nigel Guy · 2 min read

You name a skill in thirty seconds, in the middle of building it, when the context is completely obvious to you. Six months later you're staring at a list of names like "helper," "process-thing-2," and "final-version," with no memory of which one does what, and you open three of them before finding the one you actually need.

The mechanism

1. Name the trigger, not just the topic. "Email skill" tells future-you the general area. "Draft a reply to a customer complaint" tells future-you exactly when to reach for it. If the name doesn't answer "when would I use this," it's a topic label, not a working name.
2. Avoid version words that mean nothing outside the moment you wrote them. "Final," "v2," "new," and "updated" all describe a relationship to a previous version you may not remember existed. Name what the skill does, and let an actual changelog or date carry the version history if you need one.
3. Keep the name distinct from its near neighbours. If you have two skills that both touch scheduling, make sure their names say what specifically separates them — "book internal meeting" versus "reschedule external call" — rather than two names so similar you'd have to open both to tell which is which.
4. Match the name's specificity to the skill's actual scope. A narrowly scoped skill deserves a narrow name; naming it broadly promises more than it delivers and invites someone (including future you) to reach for it outside what it was built for.
5. Say the name out loud before you commit to it. If you can't say what the skill does using roughly the words in its name, the name and the skill have drifted apart — rename it, or check whether the skill itself has quietly grown past what it was originally built for.

What to skip

Skip clever or memorable names that don't describe function — a name that's fun to say but tells you nothing about when to use it is worse than a boring, accurate one. And skip renaming a skill every time you tweak it slightly; reserve renames for when the skill's actual purpose has genuinely changed, not for minor edits.

Guardrails

• A good name reduces confusion; it doesn't replace the one-sentence rule at the top of the skill itself, which is where the actual point still needs to live in full.
• If you maintain enough skills that naming collisions are a real risk, a simple, consistent naming convention (by area, by trigger type, whatever fits how you actually search for things) is worth more than getting each individual name perfectly clever.
• None of this fixes a skill that's badly scoped underneath a good name — a precise name for an imprecise skill just means you'll find the wrong tool faster, not that you've found the right one.

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