2026-09-17
Claude usually writes acceptable material for itself. Memories are a good example of this - they’re generated automatically by the AI to match your preferences. However, there is a good reason to avoid generating skill and rule files [0] automatically.
The intention of a skill or rule is to direct the AI with Human preferences. When you ask Claude to generate them based on a prompt of a few lines, it has to guess your intention and generate something based on it. What it generates is typically verbose, sometimes contains things that are irrelevant, and almost always doesn’t match your intention exactly. Since skills and rules are typically permanent fixtures - living in a repository or in your global configuration - you should take the time to write them yourself and to be careful about what is written.
Hand writing skill and rule files has some other benefits. It grants you the confidence to share them with others, since you know exactly what is written. It means others can review what you have written, and instead of arguing with what a bot has written, they can argue on the intention instead. Hand-written skills and rules are also usually less verbose, and therefore use fewer tokens than something that is generated.
Of course, all of this doesn’t mean AI can’t be involved at all. I always let Claude read the skill or rule after I’m done to verify commands or check spelling and grammar.
For something that can so greatly improve the performance of AI, it is absolutely worth taking the time and doing it right!
[0]: Rule files are always included in your prompt, like CLAUDE.md, but can be organized better.