Write a skill? Write an aide instead.

I have a few things I do every single day. Check my university LMS for assignments. Skim my inbox. See if any PRs need attention. Post a build-in-public update on Twitter.

At first, I wrote each of these as a skill — a shell script that does one thing.cool.sh scans my LMS.mail.sh checks email.tweet.sh posts to Twitter.

Then I noticed something: every morning I was running the same three commands. And every time I asked Claude to help, it had to figure out which skill to call,where to find it, and how to authenticate. Tedious for both of us.

So I stopped writing skills. I started writing aides.

An aide is just a folder with a persona, a set of skills, and a schedule. Instead of a loose cool.sh floating around, I have ntu.ydwu — my university assistant. It knows who I am (persona.md), what it can do (skills/), and when to do it (cron 7am).

$ aide ps
INSTANCE    IMAGE         CRON
ntu.ydwu    ntu-student   1     # daily briefing at 7am
twitter.ydwu twitter      0     # posts when I ask
gmail.ydwu  gmail         0     # checks mail on demand

The mental model shift is subtle but powerful. A skill is a tool. An aide is a person. You don't ask a tool "what's happening today?" — you ask a person.

When I type aide exec -p ntu.ydwu "what's due this week?", I'm not hunting for the right script. I'm asking my university assistant. It reads its persona, looks at its skills, and figures out what to call. That's its job.

This morning at 7am, ntu.ydwu sent me an email. No prompt needed. No terminal open. Just a daily briefing from my aide, sitting in my inbox, telling me what's due and who emailed me.

I think this is the right abstraction. Not "agent" — that sounds like sci-fi. Not "bot" — that sounds like spam. An aide. A dedicated assistant with a specialty.

If you're writing a skill you'll use every day, maybe what you actually want is an aide.

$ aide init my-aide
$ aide up
# now it runs in the background, doing its thing.