How Do You Vet an AI Agent Skill Before You Download It?
I'm super cautious about this. People can write any set of instructions in a skill and you can inadvertently give away access to data that you don't feel comfortable with.
I am very hesitant to copy someone's skill offline if I don't have access to read it before I download it.
Why a skill deserves more caution than a prompt
Let me pause for a quick moment and give a word of caution when it comes to downloading skills off the internet. Prompts can be a few sentences or a few paragraphs. Skills can be pages.
Hear this at 34:35 in the recording.
The restaurant review test
The way that I use this site, skills.sh, I kind of think of it like I'm going to a restaurant and I'm looking for reviews. I may not look at the reviews if there are only five reviews. I may not look at the restaurant if it has 3.6 stars. However, if I see that a restaurant has 500 reviews and 4.9 stars, I then dig in deeper and read a couple of the reviews before I decide I'm going to book a reservation. I use a similar approach when I'm at skills.sh. If I notice that a skill has been installed 3.7 million times, I may poke around to understand versus a skill that's not been downloaded at all, I won't even poke around and look at that.
Hear this at 35:38 in the recording.
Where this comes from
Every sentence above is Jacqueline V. Twillie's own, spoken live with Women Applying AI on October 7, 2026. The headings, questions, timestamps and links are the only additions. Filler words are cut, and a passage that skips a few seconds starts at the timestamp shown.
Build Your First AI Agent in One Hour: the full build, with the clips, the prompts and the transcript. This article's clip is How to decide whether to trust a skill you did not write.
Related reading: What Is an AI Agent Skill?, How Do You Create Skills for an AI Agent?, What Are AI Agent Guardrails?.
Frequently asked questions
How do I create skills for my AI agent?
The best way to create skills inside of Gumloop is to come back to the dictate feature. What I typically do is I start off by saying I want to create two skills for the COS agent. Ask me three or four questions to customize my agent's skills. It's just that simple.
What are skills?
Skills are actually workflows. It tells our agent what to do step by step. We can create skills manually, meaning we can tell as if we were writing SOP for a new hire, we could write that for the agent, we could also use something like a site, what I'm showing on my screen, skills.sh, or we can have the agent create a skill for us.
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