Match a Skill's 'degrees of freedom' to task fragility — exact scripts for narrow bridges, prose for open fields

Claude Docs·medium signal

Anthropic frames Skill authoring as setting freedom level: low freedom (one exact command, 'do not modify') for fragile sequential operations like migrations, medium freedom (parameterized pseudocode) where a preferred pattern exists, and high freedom (heuristic prose) where many paths succeed, like code review. Over-specifying open-ended tasks wastes tokens and handcuffs the model; under-specifying fragile ones invites silent breakage. Decide freedom level per section before writing instructions.