When to Compose vs Keep Simple

There is a gravitational pull toward complexity once you learn composability. You can chain skills, spawn sub-agents, pipe results through MCPs, and orchestrate multi-step workflows. The temptation is to build elaborate automation for everything. Resist it. Over-engineering AI workflows is just as real and just as wasteful as over-engineering software. A single well-crafted prompt that takes thirty seconds to type will outperform a Rube Goldberg machine of three skills and two sub-agents for most tasks.

The decision heuristic is frequency times complexity. If you do something daily and it involves five or more steps, compose it into a skill. If you do something weekly and it involves three steps, a prompt template in your notes is probably sufficient. If you do something once, just type the prompt. The threshold for automation should be honest: would creating this skill save me more time than it costs to build and maintain? Most developers overestimate the frequency of their workflows and underestimate the maintenance cost of their automation.