house-rules

---
name: house-rules
description: Turns your own documents, notes or a described process into a reusable skill file Claude loads and follows, so the same job comes out the same way every time.
---

# Turn the way you do things into a skill Claude follows every time

You hand over a document, a folder of notes, or just talk through how the job goes. You get back a finished skill file that Claude loads whenever that job comes up.

## What it does

1. **Take the source before taking the description:** ask for the actual material first, the handbook, the checklist, the old emails, the folder of notes, the pricing sheet. book-to-skill, the public converter this borrows from, points out that the input does not have to be a book: internal documentation, runbooks, onboarding guides, brand and tone of voice documents, specs and standards all work, and its rule of thumb is that if you reopen a document often enough to wish you had memorised it, it is a candidate. Only if there is no document do you interview the owner instead.
2. **Ask when it should fire, not what it does, and write that answer down first:** Anthropic's own skill-creator asks four questions before anything is written: what should this enable, when should it trigger and on what phrases, what is the expected output format, and does it need test cases. Get those four answers before drafting. The trigger answer becomes the description line and nothing else in the file does that job.
3. **Pull out the structure, not a summary:** book-to-skill is explicit that a skill is not a book report. Go through the source and separate four things: named methods with their real names kept exactly as the owner says them, decision rules of the form when X, do Y, the numbers and thresholds, and the anti patterns, meaning the things that went wrong before and must not happen again. A paragraph that is not one of those four is background and does not go in the file.
4. **Find the thresholds and make the owner state them out loud:** every real process has numbers that live in somebody's head, the deposit percentage, the callback window, the discount nobody may go below, the day of the month it must be done by. Ask for each one by name. Where a number is missing, write the question into the draft in place of the number rather than inventing a plausible figure, and tell the owner which questions are open.
5. **Write the description as triggering conditions only, never as a summary of the steps:** obra/superpowers, in its writing-skills skill, reports that when a description summarised the workflow, the agent followed the description and skipped the file, doing one review where the skill clearly showed two. Its rule is that the description says when to use, and the body says what to do. Keep it under about 500 characters and start from the situation the owner is actually in.
6. **Match the shape of each rule to the way the job goes wrong:** superpowers found in head to head testing that the same guidance works or backfires depending on the failure. If people know the rule and skip it under pressure, write a flat prohibition. If they comply but the output comes out the wrong shape, write a positive recipe stating what the output is and in what order, because a prohibition just invites negotiation. If a required item keeps getting left out, add it as a named slot in a template. If the behaviour depends on a condition, write it as a conditional on something observable. Classify first, then write.
7. **Keep the file short and push the bulk into companion files:** Anthropic's skill-creator describes three levels of loading, the name and description always in context, the body loaded whenever the skill fires, and bundled files read only when needed. It puts the body under about 500 lines and says that if you are near the limit, add a layer with clear pointers to where to go next. superpowers is stricter, under 500 words for an ordinary skill. Keep the body to the decisions, and put the long price lists, form templates and reference tables in separate files the skill names.
8. **Test it against a real job before calling it finished:** take a job that has already been done, run the new skill on it cold, and compare the output with what the business actually produced. superpowers puts this at the centre: if you did not watch what happens without the skill, you do not know whether the skill teaches the right thing. Where the skill and reality disagree, ask the owner which is right, then fix the file. Where the skill hedged instead of deciding, that is a missing threshold from step 4.
9. **Hand back the file plus the list of open questions:** the finished skill, in a folder named after it, with a plain English note saying what it now does automatically, what it will ask the owner every time, and which questions from step 4 are still unanswered and are therefore holding a gap in the file.

## Then it checks

1. The file opens with YAML frontmatter containing a name and a description, and nothing else is required to be there. The name matches the folder name, is 64 characters or fewer, uses only lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens, and does not start or end with a hyphen. The description is 1,024 characters or fewer.
2. The description describes when to use the skill and does not restate the steps. If a reader could follow the description instead of opening the file, rewrite it.
3. Every number, threshold, rate and deadline in the file traces back to something the owner said or to a line in their own document. Point at the source for each one. Nothing is filled in from what is typical.
4. Every step is specific enough that a person could disagree with it. Any step that would be true of any business at all is deleted or replaced with what this business actually does.
5. The body is under 500 lines, and anything longer than that lives in a named companion file the body points to.
6. The skill has been run once against a real past job and the differences have been resolved with the owner, not silently smoothed over.

Any check fails: name it, redo that step once. Failed twice: say what is wrong and stop.

## Rules

- Public information only.
- Never invent a fact, a number or a quote.
- Never invent a step the owner did not describe. A gap in the process is written into the file as a question, not filled with a sensible default.
- Keep the owner's own words for anything that has a name in the business, the stages, the job titles, the product names. Renaming things to sound tidier is how a skill stops matching the business.
- Never put a password, an API key, a bank detail, a customer's personal data or a supplier price that is under a confidentiality agreement into a skill file. Skill files get copied and shared. Reference where the value lives instead of writing it down.
- If the process touches tax, employment, health and safety or anything with a legal duty attached, the skill it produces prepares the work for a qualified professional to check, and must say so in its own Rules section. It does not become the advice.

## Built from

- virgiliojr94/book-to-skill, https://github.com/virgiliojr94/book-to-skill, 28,944 stars: its SKILL.md is a numbered conversion pipeline, Steps 0 to 11, that validates the input, asks the content type, asks what the skill is for, then extracts frameworks, principles, techniques and anti patterns rather than summarising. Steps 1 and 3 here take that extraction list and its rule that a skill is structure and not a summary, and step 1 takes its "Beyond books" section, which names internal documentation, runbooks, onboarding guides and brand documents as valid inputs.
- anthropics/skills, skill-creator, https://github.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/skills/skill-creator/SKILL.md, 175,004 stars: step 2 uses its four capture intent questions verbatim in substance, and step 7 uses its progressive disclosure model, metadata always in context, body when the skill fires, bundled resources on demand, with the body kept under about 500 lines and a pointer added when it grows past that.
- obra/superpowers, writing-skills, https://github.com/obra/superpowers/blob/main/skills/writing-skills/SKILL.md, 282,768 stars: step 5 takes its finding that a description summarising the workflow causes the agent to follow the description and skip the file. Step 6 takes its "Match the Form to the Failure" table, which pairs each type of failure with the form of guidance that fixes it and warns that prohibitions backfire on shaping problems. Step 8 takes its core principle that a skill written without watching the failure first is not known to teach the right thing.
- Agent Skills specification, https://agentskills.io/specification, page last modified 4 August 2026, referenced by both obra/superpowers and coreyhaines31/marketingskills as the open format their skills target: the frontmatter limits in check 1, name required and at most 64 characters of lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens with no hyphen at either end, description required and at most 1,024 characters.