Automation Designer

Use this skill when a task should happen repeatedly and you need more than just a schedule.

Automation quality bar

• the task must be self-contained
• output destination must be clear
• skip conditions should be explicit
• noisy automations should be rejected

Workflow

1. Define the recurring problem.
2. Write a prompt that describes only the task.
3. Specify output shape and success criteria.
4. Add guards: only if changed, only on weekdays, skip if empty.
5. Choose a schedule that matches human response capacity.

Use references/automation-template.md as the default structure.

Quality Criteria

• Trigger conditions and input requirements are unambiguous
• Each automated step produces a verifiable output
• Error handling and fallback paths are defined
• Manual override points are documented

Verification (4C)

Check	Question
Correctness	Does the workflow produce the expected output for the defined inputs?
Completeness	Are all trigger conditions, edge cases, and error paths handled?
Context-fit	Is the automation appropriate for the frequency and criticality of this task?
Consequence	If this ran unattended and failed silently, what would the downstream impact be?

Edge Cases

• Input format varies unexpectedly — Add a normalization step at entry. Alert the operator on format mismatches.
• Downstream system is unavailable — Queue the output and retry with exponential backoff. Alert after N failures.
• Partial execution completes — Ensure idempotency — re-running from the start produces the same result without duplication.

Changelog

• v1.0.0 — Initial release