1.0 KiB
Root Skill Reference
Why the State Machine?
LLMs are prone to "momentum", where they output a plan and immediately start executing it in the same breath, often writing the wrong files or breaking things before the user can review.
The PLAN vs IMPLEMENTATION state machine forcefully stops the AI between thought and action.
Why the Active Skill Echo?
Context windows shift. If you read a skill 5 turns ago, you will forget the strict prohibitions (🚨 Prohibitions).
By forcing you to output ### Active Skills: and physically writing out the 2-3 most critical rules, the LLM attention mechanism (Self-Attention) locks onto those rules for the duration of the generation step. It is a hack to prevent "lost in the middle" syndrome.
Migration History
These root instructions previously lived in the top-level .ai/skills/root-skill/SKILL.md file but were migrated into the Matt Pocock Agent Skills standard (.ai/skills/root-skill/SKILL.md) to ensure a 100% unified architecture. Now, even the root file is just a skill.