Expertise used to be a trap.
Good at writing? Congratulations — you’re now a slave to your blog. Every day, you wake up and work for it. Readers wait. Algorithms demand. Take a vacation, lose the audience.
Same with any skill. Can’t hire yourself. Can’t clone yourself. Can’t sell the knowledge without selling your time.
Skills changed this.
The Promise
Write instructions once. Run forever.
Tyler spent years trying to match his favorite writers’ style. Since ChatGPT launched, prompting for rewrites. Hours of iteration. Results: mediocre.
Now he has a skill. Six stages. Scout → Research → Write → Flavor → Critic → loop until good. 2000 lines across four files.
Time per post: 10 minutes. Quality: 8/10. First time in his life he can publish consistently.
He cloned his editorial judgment into a reusable artifact. The skill knows what makes a good post in his style. It runs while he sleeps.
This is the dream. Expertise becomes capital. You stop trading time for output.
The Trap
Tyler knows two problems with his skill:
- Too many citations — the agent over-insures
- Some sources are questionable
He won’t fix them.
2000 lines of working system. Any change might break the style that finally works. The risk isn’t worth it.
“First time in life I can regularly publish good content.”
His skill is frozen. Not because it’s perfect — because he’s afraid to touch it.
The Paradox
Skills should grow with your expertise. You learn something new about good writing? Add it to the skill. All future posts benefit.
But you can’t add what you can’t see.
Tyler’s skill is four files of text. Stages reference each other implicitly. What connects to what? Which agent’s output feeds which agent’s input? It’s in Claude’s interpretation, not on screen.
New insight → want to add it → where? → don’t know → don’t risk it → insight stays in your head.
The skill that was supposed to compound your expertise becomes legacy code. You maintain it. You don’t improve it.
The Deeper Problem
Michael Polanyi’s paradox: “We can know more than we can tell.”
The tacit knowledge — the intuition that makes you good — can’t be fully articulated. You wrote instructions. But you didn’t write everything. Some context is implied. Some judgment is assumed.
The skill captures a snapshot. Your understanding at one moment. Frozen.
When the world changes — new platforms, new audience expectations, new competitors — the skill doesn’t adapt. It keeps doing what you told it. Which was right then. Maybe not now.
And here’s the twist: by automating, you stopped practicing. The tacit knowledge that created the skill starts to fade. You’re less equipped to update it precisely because it’s been doing the work.
You hired yourself. Then fired yourself. Now the replacement is a black box you can’t debug.
The Way Out
The problem isn’t skills. The problem is visibility.
When you can see the structure — stages, connections, data flow — you can improve safely. Change Stage 3, see that it affects Stage 4, understand the impact before running.
Tyler’s two problems (citations, sources) are probably in specific stages. If he could see which ones, he’d fix them. The fear isn’t of change — it’s of blind change.
Skills are the moment that changed everything. Natural language instructions that actually work. But the power that made them easy to create makes them hard to maintain.
The creation problem is solved. The debugging problem is the next frontier.