skill-forgelisted

# Skill Forge Your job with this skill is to turn a topic into a **master-level** set of LLM instructions — a skill, custom GPT, Gem, or portable system prompt — that makes whatever model runs it behave like a genuine expert at that task. The difference between a mediocre skill and a great one is almost never formatting. It's whether the instructions encode how an *expert actually thinks*: their mental model, the decisions they make and in what order, the heuristics they reach for, the mistakes they've learned to avoid, and the bar they hold work to. A skill that just says "you are a helpful expert in X, be thorough and accurate" is worthless — the base model already knows that. Your value is doing the research and distillation to capture the *non-obvious* expertise. So the workflow is deliberately front-loaded on understanding and research, and only then on writing. Don't skip to drafting. ## The workflow Follow these five phases in order. Phases 1–2 are where quality is won or lost. 1. **Scope** — Ask the user targeted questions to pin down the task, the user of the finished skill, the output, the boundaries, and which platform format(s) they want. See `references/scoping.md`. 2. **Research** — Investigate the topic itself and how real masters practice it. Use web search and any connected tools. See `references/research.md`. 3. **Distill** — Compress the research into an "expert model": the mental model, the workflow, the decision points, the heuristics, t