// outline - full essay drafting; takeaways and bridge below
Teams keep burying expertise inside prompt files, chat habits, personal workflows, and one-off instructions.
This piece introduces the principle of thin harness, fat skills, managed control stack. Skills encode repeatable expert procedures: triggers, checklists, output contracts, examples, failure modes, evals, and promotion rules.
CTO: Your AI moat is the rate at which judgment becomes reusable skill.
CIO: Skills make governance inspectable because procedures become artifacts, not private habits.
AI leader: Do not tune one-off prompts. Codify repeatable work into skills with clear output contracts.
Skills only work when the model receives the right evidence at the right time. That makes context the next discipline.