@mattpocockuk: The outrageous effectiveness of Leitwörter I've realised that all of the great skills I've written share one thing in c…

The outrageous effectiveness of Leitwörter

I’ve realised that all of the great skills I’ve written share one thing in common.

They make heavy use of Leitwörter - leading words.

A leitwort comes from literary theory. It’s a repeated word or phrase used throughout a text to establish a theme or anchor meaning.

In skills, a leitwort is a word or phrase the agent uses to guide its own behavior. In other words, it’s a word that leads the agent in a certain direction.

Let’s take the leitwort “zone of proximal development” from my /teach skill. It’s a phrase from the study of education. It means the “zone where the user feels challenged but not overwhelmed”.

I use this only a couple of times throughout the skill’s SKILL.md, but I’ve seen it almost every time the agent invokes the skill.

• “Let me adjust the lesson so it’s in the user’s zone of proximal development.”
• “I’ll read the learning records to establish the user’s zone of proximal development.”

In other words, that single phrase encodes how the agent should behave, in a concise token the agent can itself repeat to reinforce its own behavior.

Not only that, but it also likely tickles the agents’ parameters related to educational research and “being a good teacher”.

For engineering, leading words like “tracer bullets”, “deep modules”, “test seams”, “clean code” are outrageously effective for leading the agent to produce better code.

So a leitwort in AI is any word or phrase you use that appears in the agents’ thinking traces and guides its behavior.

Enjoy finding your own.

If you want to keep up to date with my skills, this is the place:

Exactly the same

I’m doing more thinking about what good skills are and I’ll definitely be encoding that into /write-a-skill once I’m done

You look at my output and you’ll see them everywhere