Issue 4, Sep 23, 2026
The Skill Trigger Trap
Senior AI Engineer interview at Google DeepMind, and the interviewer asks:
“Your agent ignores a skill that would obviously help. On unrelated tasks, it loads a skill that doesn’t apply. Is this a prompt problem, a model problem, or an eval problem? And how do you debug it?”
Don’t say: “The skill instructions aren’t clear enough. I’d rewrite them to be more detailed.”
Why rewriting your skill instructions won't stop agent misfires and how treating YAML descriptions like prose classifiers fixes your routing precision.
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The full answer, with the mechanism and the arithmetic, is for paid subscribers on Substack.