Methodology, voice, templates, no-gos. Pull everything out of your head and into files.
After the output standard is locked. You now know what the result should look like. Now you collect everything the skill needs to know to actually produce that result.
The actual steps you take when you produce one of these results yourself. Not the theory. The moves. If you have never written it down, voice-record yourself doing one and transcribe.
Tone, sentence patterns, words you love, words you ban. Examples of good lines from your own writing.
Frameworks, fill-in-the-blank scaffolds, common shapes. Anything that comes back across multiple outputs.
Words to avoid. Formats to avoid. Topics to avoid. Mistakes a junior would make. This list saves more skills than any clever instruction.
One Markdown file per bucket. Link them from the skill itself. Short, scannable, no fluff. Update them as you learn more.
Keeping the knowledge in your head and assuming "Claude already knows that". It does not. It knows the internet average. Your skill needs the specific thing.
Continue with skill-creator. Step 3: gather knowledge. Walk me through four buckets — methodology, voice, templates, no-gos. Ask me about each. Create one markdown file per bucket from what I tell you. If I record voice notes, transcribe them. End state: four files the skill can read.
Every minute you spend writing it down once saves an hour later. The skill is only as smart as the files it can read.