A short piece of fiction, written by API Evangelist. The reader is imagined; the post, and every number and quotation from it, is real: "Lint An Agent Skill Before You Hand It To An Agent," Kin Lane, November 10, 2026, https://apievangelist.com/2026/11/10/lint-an-agent-skill-before-you-hand-it-to-an-agent/
Marisol maintains the internal tooling for a mid-sized logistics team. She read the post on a Tuesday while her build ran. Its opening bothered her more than she wanted to admit. Kin Lane wrote that teams are copying skill files between repositories and handing them to agents with no review at all, and that was an accurate description of her team's shared folder. Someone had pasted a SKILL.md into it in the spring. Two other people had copied it since, and she had never read it closely.
She skipped ahead to what the tool found. He ran 18 rules against two public skills, one of them 314 lines long, and both passed with zero errors and zero warnings. Her first reaction was a small, mean satisfaction. If the best-known public skills came back with notes, her sloppy folder would look fine by comparison. Then the sentence about the missing frontmatter landed on her. A skill with no allowed-tools list, he wrote, hands the decision about what it may touch to whoever runs it. She thought about the copy in her folder. She did not know whether it had an allowed-tools list. She did not know who ran it, either.
She disagreed with part of it. The section rules check for a heading called Usage or Examples, and the post admits as much: the PDF skill is full of worked code under other headings. To Marisol that sounded like a rule that would nag people into renaming headings to please a checker. She noted that the author agrees it should only be a note, and that he warns readers to expect those two notes on nearly every skill. That was fair of him, but she still pictured a manager seeing forty info lines and asking why nobody had fixed them.
The other thing that nagged at her was the request itself. The curl command sends the whole file to a service she doesn't run. The post says it's free, and she believed that, but her team's skills describe how their systems are used. Even a loose description of that wasn't something she wanted to paste into someone else's endpoint on a whim. So she would not run it over the whole folder today, whatever the inventory idea promised.
She did like one idea, though. The post says the output can go back to an agent, because each diagnostic has a stable code and a path, so the agent can add a missing version and lint again. She liked that it described a loop she could picture. She did not trust anyone, herself included, to carry out a long checklist by hand.
Her build finished and she ignored it. She opened the shared folder and sorted by date. She found the oldest skill, the one from the spring, and read it start to finish for the first time. It had a name. It had a description that said when to use it. It had nothing else in the frontmatter, no version and no tools.
Then she did the one small thing she was willing to do. She picked a different skill, one that held nothing about her employer's systems, copied the post's curl command into her terminal, and pointed it at that file.