skill & tool scan
First of three blocking steps: before any task, check whether a skill or connected tool already does this. Written procedure beats re-derivation.
What it is
The first of three steps that run before any task, however small: scan the available skills and connected tools for one that already covers the job. Skills encode procedures that earned their place by failing once; skipping the scan re-derives work and reintroduces solved bugs.
Why
Skills encode procedures that already survived their failure modes. Skipping the scan means re-deriving the steps from scratch — and re-deriving drops the one step that was added because it broke last time.
How I use it
Every prompt starts with a match against the skill list and the connected MCP servers — by the task's shape, not just keywords. If a skill almost fits, I use it and adapt rather than rebuilding the procedure. If nothing fits and the task recurs, that's the signal to write a new skill.
Get it
The whole method is downloadable and adaptable — method/steps/skill-mcp-scan.md inside the zip, alongside the full rules file the step comes from.
Connected
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