Feedback on your automating-mail skill #7
Description
I took a look at your automating-mail skill and wanted to share some thoughts.
Links:
The TL;DR
You're at 100/100, full marks. This is based on Anthropic's skill best practices, and honestly, your skill hits the standard across the board. Strongest areas: Spec Compliance (14/15) and Progressive Disclosure Architecture (27/30)—your reference structure is clean, every file has a purpose, and nothing's wasted. Weakest area (still solid): Writing Style (9/10)—mainly because your PyXA examples are a bit more verbose than their JXA equivalents.
What's Working Well
- Reference architecture is chef's kiss. 10 carefully scoped reference files, each one level deep from the main SKILL.md. No navigation bloat, clear "What to load" sections. This is how layered skills should be structured.
- Spec compliance is tight. Valid YAML, correct naming conventions (hyphen-case), good third-person description with solid trigger terms like "JXA Mail automation" and "filter email messages." You nailed the metadata.
- Practical scope boundaries. You've got a clean "When Not to Use" section, which matters because automation tools can get messy. Developers know exactly where this skill ends.
- Examples across three stacks. JXA, PyXA, PyObjC patterns with input/output examples and API reference tables. That's comprehensive coverage for a macOS-specific skill.
The Thing Worth Fixing
PyXA examples are longer than JXA for the same operations. In your mail-recipes.md, the PyXA filter example is 8 lines while the JXA version is basically one line. This makes PyXA look more complicated than it actually is, and it throws off the writing density. Either trim the PyXA examples to match JXA's conciseness, or add a note explaining that PyXA requires more setup boilerplate. This would push you from 9/10 to a clean 10/10 on writing style. Small fix, big signal.
Other Things Worth Fixing
-
Quick start examples need defensive checks. Your examples pull
Mail.inbox.messages[0]without checking if the inbox is empty. Add a simple guard:if (msgs.length > 0). Takes one line, prevents runtime surprises. (+1 point on utility). -
Error handling patterns are missing. Your validation checklist is solid, but the examples don't show try/catch blocks for common failures (permission denied, empty inbox, network timeouts). Add 2-3 error handling examples in mail-basics.md so devs know what to expect.
-
TOC for reference files over 100 lines. Files like mail-recipes.md and mail-pyxa-api-reference.md could benefit from a quick table of contents at the top. Makes scanning faster, especially for the API reference.
Quick Wins
- Trim PyXA examples to match JXA brevity (or add a note about boilerplate)
- Add defensive checks to Quick Start examples
- Add try/catch patterns to mail-basics.md
- Add TOCs to reference files over 100 lines
Checkout your skill here: [SkillzWave.ai](https://skillzwave.ai) | [SpillWave](https://spillwave.com) We have an agentic skill installer that install skills in 14+ coding agent platforms. Check out this guide on how to improve your agentic skills.