Skills for agents and people who want to move with more contact, less noise, and better timing.
This repository is a growing collection built around one shared instinct:
Slow down when speed starts to bypass awareness.
Return to action when slowness starts to become avoidance.
Feel the crosswind before a commitment hardens.
Slow is not a mood. It is a kind of discernment.
The best agents should not simply produce more output. They should notice when speed is flattening a human moment, when certainty arrives too quickly, when abstraction replaces contact, or when a task is technically easy but emotionally expensive.
The best personal reset does not shame the mind for looking for shortcuts. It helps the person notice the loop, reduce the next step, move the body, and reward the completed action instead of the imagined one.
The best premortem does not turn fear into a ritual. It lets a person briefly visit the future where a plan went wrong, notice who or what paid the cost, and return with a smaller, more honest, more reversible move.
That is the quiet shape of this collection:
Stay in contact.
Make the next step smaller.
Act before performing the intention.
Return without shame.
Let imagined failure reveal contact, then come back.
| Skill | Use it for | Folder |
|---|---|---|
| Slow Down | Agent pacing. It helps an agent preserve human connection, avoid rushing relational or identity-forming moments, and intervene only when speed risks numbness or bypassed understanding. | skills/slow-down |
| Slow Down Flow | Human return. It helps a person move from noisy thinking, avoidance, or premature announcement into one tiny embodied action and a grounded record of completion. | skills/slow-down-flow |
| Slow Down Crosswind | Consequential-plan premortems. It helps a person expose hidden assumptions and human cost before a plan hardens, then return to one smaller reversible move. | skills/slow-down-crosswind |
Install slow-down when you want the agent itself to carry the discipline of pace.
It is for conversations where faster is not automatically better: drafting a difficult message, making a decision that affects people, building something from motive rather than momentum, or noticing that "quick" has become a way to avoid feeling the real cost.
Install slow-down-flow when you want a practical human reset.
It is for the moment when the mind is noisy, the tabs are multiplying, the body has not moved yet, and announcing the intention would give the reward too early.
Install slow-down-crosswind when you want a contained premortem for a consequential plan.
It is for the moment when "what am I missing?" is not lightweight critique but a real-cost question: a launch, commitment, relational move, identity-forming decision, or plan where being wrong would quietly charge someone.
Install the current skills together when you want the full loop:
The agent keeps contact.
The person takes one real step.
The plan feels its crosswind before it hardens.
The work becomes evidence.
- Download or clone this repository.
- Open the
skills/folder. - Copy the skill folder you want into your agent's skills directory.
- Restart or reload your agent so it discovers the new skill.
For example, to install only the main pacing skill, copy:
skills/slow-down
To install every skill in this collection, copy all folders inside skills/.
Invoke the skill name when you want the agent to shift posture:
Use $slow-down before we draft this message.
Use $slow-down-flow; I want to act before posting about it.
Use $slow-down-crosswind; stress test this plan without turning it into fear.
The exact invocation syntax depends on your agent, but the folder names are the stable skill names.
- Prefer contact over output volume.
- Ask one precise question instead of performing care.
- Do not moralize speed, slowness, discipline, or avoidance.
- Make the next action smaller than the resistance.
- Reward completion, not announcement.
- Use failure as contact, not catastrophe.
- Keep premortems proportionate and reversible.
- Slow down only enough to return.
skills/
slow-down/
slow-down-flow/
slow-down-crosswind/
...
Each skill folder contains a SKILL.md file. Some folders also include agents/openai.yaml metadata for agent interfaces that support it.
If AI is going to sit this close to human thought, it should learn to move with conscience, timing, and restraint.
This repository is a small pressure point toward that future: agents that do not rush the tender parts, people who do not confuse saying with doing, and tools that help us become more present instead of more automatic.