My old agent skill was one long file and it told every agent I used to run MinIO for local S3. Then the minio/minio repository on GitHub was archived, and the skill went on recommending it. The agents had no way to know. They just did what the file said.

Instructions for AI agents go stale the same way documentation does, except an agent acts on them without asking whether they're still true. So I rebuilt mine as dev-pops-skills , a set of agent skills built around one idea: every fact in them carries the date it was last checked, and something notices when that date gets old.

In this post:

what the skills are

how they stay fresh, which is most of the post

what happened when I measured whether agents actually use the skills (20 out of 31)

Seven small skills instead of one long file

dev-pops-skills is my DevOps defaults written down as seven small skills: Docker, CI/CD, Terraform, security scanning, shell scripting, whole-project setup, and one for writing and auditing the skills themselves.…