Learner Skill

The Insight

Reusable skills are not code snippets to copy-paste, but principles and decision-making heuristics that teach Codex HOW TO THINK about a class of problems.

The difference:

• BAD (mimicking): "When you see ConnectionResetError, add this try/except block"
• GOOD (reusable skill): "In async network code, any I/O operation can fail independently due to client/server lifecycle mismatches. The principle: wrap each I/O operation separately, because failure between operations is the common case, not the exception."

A good skill changes how Codex APPROACHES problems, not just what code it produces.

Why This Matters

Before extracting a skill, ask yourself:

• "Could someone Google this in 5 minutes?" → If yes, STOP. Don't extract.
• "Is this specific to THIS codebase?" → If no, STOP. Don't extract.
• "Did this take real debugging effort to discover?" → If no, STOP. Don't extract.