Generalize Skill
Prepare a skill for sharing by separating what’s personal or proprietary from what’s structural. Complement to Personalize Skill — personalize-skill adapts a skill to your workflow; generalize-skill prepares your skill for others.
When to use
- Moving a skill from personal to team use — the skill works for you but has hardcoded paths, tool preferences, or conventions that won’t work for colleagues
- Publishing a skill externally — the skill needs proprietary content removed and infrastructure details replaced with templates before sharing outside the organization
When not to use
- Building a skill from scratch for general use (start with the skill creator instead)
- The skill is already generic with no personal or proprietary content
How it works
- Analyze — read the skill directory and classify every element as structural (preserve), personal (generalize in both modes), or proprietary (generalize in public mode only)
- Present the map — show the classification grouped by action needed. Wait for confirmation before changing anything.
- IP review (public mode only) — two independent parallel reviewers check for proprietary content and architecture-revealing combinations. Follows the shared IP review process.
- Generalize — apply confirmed changes: swap tool references, template infrastructure config, preserve workflow structure and earned specificity
- Review — check for coherence, completeness, residual personal/proprietary content, and that the skill is still useful after generalization
- Deliver — write the generalized skill with a summary of changes, preserved elements, and any templates created
What it assumes
- A source skill to generalize (path to a skill directory)
- Author knowledge of what’s proprietary — the analysis identifies candidates, but the author confirms what needs to change
- Shared IP review brief — for public mode, uses
shared/ip-review-brief.mdfrom the skills repository. If using this skill standalone, copy the file into this skill’s directory.