Prompts decay. Skills accumulate.
Every AI interaction starts fresh with the same context-building overhead. Prompts are transient. Skills are persistent instruction sets that improve through use.
A ratchet approach to AI workflows has four stages:
- Capture
- Extract patterns from successful interactions
- Encode
- Convert patterns into reusable, versioned skills
- Score
- Measure skill performance against defined win conditions
- Improve
- Refine skills automatically when quality drops below threshold
This builds compound leverage. Not through better prompting, but through a library of working approaches that improve over time. Each successful run tightens the ratchet. Knowledge locks in. Regression becomes harder.
Stop writing prompts. Start building skills.
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