Skills for a more leveraged workflow

I’ve been skeptical in general about sharing workflow skills. I have a bunch I share with direct collaborators, but there are a lot of “AI skills” repos out there and I’ve only found 2 of them really useful to me (#1, #2). I thought working out what you wanted and making your own was important – but I kept packaging up a similar set of skills to share with specific people, because I underestimated the value of having a starting point. So finally I accepted – I too would make an AI skills repo: ai-dev-starter-kit.

The conversation I was having is how to go from leveraging AI to leveraged by AI. I think it’s a question of what do you hand off, and what do you keep? AI can do a lot of work, but it can also generate a lot of work for you. You have to figure out how to manage that so you’re not just scattered and getting less done (been there).

At the core of it is a board configured a certain way, and three terminals. The board is the source of truth, and work is issues moving through a status workflow. Two of the terminals are the skills that generate and validate code: the orchestrator, which fans work out across the board, and the merge queue, which serialises the landings and does final validation before anything goes in – things that can run for hours with periodic checkins. The third terminal is the one that requires thinking and engagement, and the work I do in it is to make work agentable (i.e. push it into the queue the other two terminals run).

The other thing in it is a sample CLAUDE.md – talking to people in mid-sized orgs, I consistently notice it’s under-leveraged, and it’s much easier to change robot behaviour than human behaviour.

The others are smaller. One goes through what went in overnight and flags anything I should worry about – review isn’t required before merge, but I still want to know what landed.. fable-audit-prompts is my answer to “what is Fable even for”: I use it to audit things where I have vibes but not concrete ideas, and it generates a report that makes that work agentable by less expensive models.

If you’re looking for a starting point for a more leveraged workflow, I hope this can be helpful – whether you take some pieces as they are or just as inspiration. Feedback or ideas always welcome.