A city treasurer's office wrote a skill that reconciles daily receipting exports against the bank feed. The skill works correctly when a user invokes it by name, but during ordinary reconciliation conversations the model never reaches for it. Its frontmatter description reads simply Reconciliation helper. What is the most likely cause?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
A skill's description is its job posting. Reconciliation helper says what it is but never when to call it, so name the situations, such as daily receipting exports and bank-feed matching, and it starts getting picked up.
Full Explanation
Automatic skill selection is a routing decision made from a catalog, and a routing decision can only be as good as the signal it routes on. The model sees skill names and descriptions rather than skill bodies, which means the description is not documentation about the skill; it is the matching surface the model reasons over.
Because the SKILL.md body loads only after a skill has been selected, the description must carry both what the skill does and the concrete situations and vocabulary that should trigger it. Reconciliation helper gives an ordinary reconciliation conversation nothing to match against, which is exactly the reported symptom. Invocation by name still works because it bypasses routing entirely, while automatic selection has no signal to act on.
There is no CLAUDE.md allow list gating skill invocation, since discovery comes from the skill living in a recognized skills directory; body length is not an auto-selection filter, and a long body is a reason to split reference material into bundled files for on-demand loading rather than a cause of the skill being ignored; and the claim that skills are never auto-invoked contradicts the scenario's own premise, because the treasurer's office is troubleshooting a supported behavior that is failing to fire.
Exam caveat: a richer description improves matching but also competes with every other skill's description, so heavily overlapping descriptions trade one routing failure for another. Operational check: rewrite the description naming the triggering situations, then replay several past reconciliation conversations and confirm the skill fires on those while staying quiet on unrelated treasury work.