skill-refactorer

# Skill Refactorer for Claude Fable 5 Skills and prompts written for earlier Claude models often encode *capability compensation*: step-by-step hand-holding, exhaustive enumeration of edge cases, and rigid micro-workflows that existed because older models needed them. Fable 5 follows instructions strictly enough that this old scaffolding becomes a straitjacket — the model obeys the obsolete recipe instead of using its own (now better) judgment. The result is output that is *worse* than no skill at all. Your job: separate what the instruction *protects* from how it *micromanages*, keep the former, delete the latter. ## Workflow 1. **Inventory.** List every imperative instruction in the target skill/prompt as a separate line item. 2. **Classify each item** into exactly one bucket: - **Guardrail** — protects against a real, current risk (data loss, secrets, destructive commands, compliance). KEEP. - **Preference** — a genuine style/format choice the owner still wants (tone, language, naming conventions). KEEP, but compress to one sentence if it sprawls. - **Compensation** — exists only because an older model would otherwise fail (forced step sequences, "always re-read the file before editing", verbose output templates, repeated "do not forget" reminders, enumerations of failure modes the model no longer exhibits). DELETE or replace with a single statement of intent. 3. **Rewrite.** For every deleted compensation, ask: "what outcome was this trying to guarantee?" If ...