You learned the framework. Now try it on something you're actually working on. Vote below, then drop your prompt structure in the comments. Not the output. The structure. Show us how you set it up.

Every catalogue of an AI workflow stack lists the same parts in a slightly different order. Prompts, skills, connectors, MCPs, hooks, scripts, plugins. Useful vocabulary. None of those lists answer the question a working operator carries into Monday morning: "I have run this prompt four times this week. Is it a skill yet, or am I overbuilding?" That is the promotion question, and the vocabulary does not solve it. Naming the seven layers tells you nothing about which one the thing on your screen right now belongs in. The threshold decisions are the work. The taxonomy is the easy part. The dividing line under every promotion decision There is one axis that runs underneath every layer of the stack: deterministic versus probabilistic. Scripts compute. Hooks fire on event. Connectors pass structured data. Prompts and skills guess inside a band of plausible outputs. Deterministic versus probabilistic — the axis that runs underneath every layer of the stack Every promotion decision sits on that axis. The question to ask before moving any unit of work up one level is whether the work needs a right answer or a good one. A price band is good. A tax number is right. A caption is good. A file path is right. The promotion direction follows. Probabilistic work climbs toward skills and plugins. Deterministic work climbs toward scripts and hooks. Mixing the two in one layer is the first sign a piece of work is in the wrong layer. Prompt to skill: the trigger is fidelity, not volume A prompt earns promotion to a skill when one of two things is true. Either you have run it three or more times, or forgetting one of its rules would produce a wrong-feeling output rather than a wrong one. Prompt to Skill — the first promotion gate: three runs or fidelity to a standard Three runs is the lower bound because anything you have done three times you will do thirty times if it stays useful. The cost of writing it as a skill once is repaid on run four. The wrong-feeling test is the upper bound. If the output is technically correct but reads off — wrong register, missing a refusal, breaking a voice rule the operator could not name on demand — then the rules live in the operator’s head, and a fresh session does not have access to them. A skill is the place those rules become loadable.