Skill checklists can prevent agent-skill sprawl

Matt Pocock frames "skill hell" as a maintainability problem: agent skills need clear trigger rules, lean structure, deliberate steering language, and regular pruning. Why it matters: As teams add more agent capabilities, bloated or ambiguous skills increase context load and make agents harder to predict. A simple checklist turns skill authoring into an operational discipline instead of ad hoc prompt accumulation.

Try this: Audit one frequently used agent skill against four checks: trigger, structure, steering, and pruning. Move rarely needed detail into references, remove no-op instructions, and make the invocation mode explicit.