Yes, lots of LLM Skills quickly turn into applications. The skill is the program and the LLM is the compute, and that leaves the harness to manage the state. I’ve found that these skills need explicit instructions on how to manage state across sessions.

In my work, this typically means an opinionated local folder structure and a dedicated /init skill that implements it. Immediately this means we have more than one skill so we’re talking about a plugin now.

Then I think about meta-state. Not just “what is on disk” but “where are we in this application’s multi-session lifecycle?” For Socratic tutoring, that means checking to see if we’ve completed an initial intake, then what skill levels the user has demonstrated, and finally what’s next on the menu.

For this specific skill, I’m surprised it doesn’t say anything about curriculum. It just assumes the model knows the topic and can improvise both a curriculum and credible assessments of progress in that curriculum. That can’t be true for all things people want to learn, so we need a /build-curriculum skill. And probably a /validate-curriculum skill for actual experts to use before launching a given curriculum.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about this kind of thing as I roll out skills to my firm.