Feedback on your mastering-aws-cli skill

[RichardHightower]

I took a look at your mastering-aws-cli skill and wanted to share some thoughts.

Links:

• GitHub
• Your agentic skill in the SkillzWave marketplace

The TL;DR

You're at 96/100, solid A-grade territory. This is based on Anthropic's skill best practices rubric. Your strongest area is Spec Compliance (15/15 - perfect score), and you've built a really well-organized reference architecture with 17 deep-dive guides. The progressive disclosure structure is excellent - your SKILL.md acts as a proper hub routing to focused reference files, which is exactly how this should work. Weakest area is Utility at 18/20 - not because the content isn't valuable, but there's a bit of room to strengthen feedback loops and verification patterns.

What's Working Well

• Perfect spec compliance - Your YAML frontmatter, naming conventions (hyphen-case), and description with 35+ trigger phrases is textbook. The description alone ("AWS CLI v2 quick-reference for experienced developers") is concise and specific.

• Smart hub-and-spoke structure - Your SKILL.md at 310 lines routes to 17 reference files (300-700 lines each), each exactly one level deep. No nested chains, no decision paralysis. This is token-efficient and exactly what good PDA looks like.

• Trigger coverage that actually works - You've got 35 trigger terms covering services (Lambda, DynamoDB, ECS), operations (IAM, tunneling, deployments), and patterns (cross-account, OIDC federation). This is thorough without being bloated.

• Practical command density - Your references are packed with real, usable AWS CLI commands with inline comments explaining what each flag does. The JSON policy templates and GitHub Actions workflows are genuinely helpful.

The Big One: Feedback Loops Could Be Stronger

You're at 3/4 for feedback loops, and here's the thing - you have verification commands scattered throughout, but they're not systematically called out as "verify this worked" checkpoints.

The fix: Add a consistent verification pattern to your multi-step workflows. For example, in references/iam-security.md and references/github-cicd.md, add explicit "Verify success" sections after complex operations:

### Create an OIDC provider
[commands here]

**Verify it worked:**
aws iam list-open-id-connect-providers
# Should list your new provider's ARN

Do this for the 5-6 most critical multi-step workflows (OIDC setup, cross-account roles, MSK cluster creation, VPC setup). This adds maybe 10-15 lines total but bumps feedback loops from 3→4 and utility to 19/20.

Other Things Worth Fixing

1. "When Not to Use" could be tighter - Your SKILL.md says "AWS SDK code — For boto3..." but could be more explicit: "This covers CLI commands only. For boto3, CDK constructs, CloudFormation templates, or Terraform — use language/IaC-specific documentation." Adds clarity on boundaries (+1 point).

2. Large references lack sub-navigation - Your iam-security.md (606 lines) and s3.md (520+ lines) have TOCs but no section anchors or "back to top" links. Add --- between major sections or anchor links for files >500 lines. Helps people jump around (+1 point).

3. Some comment cruft - Lines like # Array output and # Named objects in advanced-patterns.md are educational but add tokens. Keep them (they're genuinely helpful), but consider a condensed reference table at the start of that file for quick lookups.

Quick Wins

• Add explicit verification commands to 5-6 key multi-step workflows → +1 point (utility to 19/20)
• Clarify "When Not to Use" boundaries → +1 point (clarity)
• Add section anchors to files >500 lines → +1 point (navigation)
• You're essentially at 99/100 territory with these three tweaks

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