AI Guides › Skills & Agents
The Difference Between A Personal Skill And A Published One
By Nigel Guy · 2 min read
A skill you built for yourself works, and it's tempting to treat "it works
for me" as evidence it's ready to hand to someone else, or to publish
somewhere others might pick it up. It usually isn't. A personal skill is
allowed to lean on things you already know — your accounts, your naming
habits, the context sitting in your head — and none of that travels with
the file when someone else opens it.
The rule: a skill you use yourself can quietly assume what you already
know; a skill you publish for others can't assume anything except what's
written in it — and most of the real work in publishing is finding and
removing those assumptions, not polishing the prose.
The mechanism
- List everything the skill currently assumes about its user or
environment. Accounts already set up, tools already connected, your
own shorthand for naming things, context from a conversation you had
with yourself while building it. Be exhaustive here — this list is the
whole exercise.
- For each assumption, decide: state it explicitly, or make the skill
fail loudly when it's missing. A stranger without your setup should
get a clear message about what's missing, not a confusing partial
result that looks like a bug in the skill itself.
- Rewrite guardrails for a stranger's likely mistakes, not yours. Your
own guardrails section probably reflects mistakes you've personally made
or worried about. Someone else will make different ones, often around
exactly the assumptions you just surfaced in step one.
- Test it with someone genuinely unfamiliar with your setup, if you
can find someone willing. This is the closest thing to a guarantee that
the assumptions you found were the real ones, not just the ones that
occurred to you.
- Version it and attach ownership once it's published. A personal
skill can sit unlabelled in your own folder. A published one needs a
record of who's responsible for it and what version someone's actually
running, the moment more than one person depends on it.
What to skip
Skip publishing "as is" the moment a personal skill starts working —
working for you is the wrong bar for something meant for someone else. And
skip over-engineering a skill you have no intention of publishing to meet
this standard anyway; a personal skill that only you'll ever run doesn't
need documentation written for a stranger who will never read it.
Guardrails
- This is the same distinction as personal notes versus a document you send
someone else: the effort belongs at the point something crosses from
your head into someone else's use, not before.
- A published skill inherits your name as its author whether you formalise
that or not — treat the ownership question as already decided the moment
someone else can run it, not something to sort out later.
- Publishing doesn't mean the skill is finished; it means the bar for
"finished enough" just moved. Keep reviewing it after publication the way
you would any skill someone else relies on.
All 751 AI guides · JulieMango plans from £17/mo