TL;DR : My AI agent had a 246-line instruction file for managing issues in Linear. 150 of those lines were workarounds: hardcoded UUIDs, curl fallbacks, notes like "the CLI doesn’t support X." I didn’t rewrite them — I built a tool that made them unnecessary. Now those 150 lines are gone. Have you ever written a set of instructions so long that its sheer length proves something is fundamentally wrong? I’m not talking about legitimate documentation. I mean those files that start with "use tool X" and then spend 80% of the text explaining when tool X doesn’t work and what to do instead. Instructions that are, effectively, a list of apologies for the tool you should have built in the first place. I had one of those. And it was embarrassing. Anatomy of 150 Lines of Garbage The context: I work with an AI agent (Claude Code) that manages my issues in Linear. To help the agent understand how to do this, I had a skill — an instruction file the agent reads when it needs to create, list, or update issues.…