Yesterday, I wrote about using Cursor to review my blog for performance. Cursor (and again, for full disclosure I work here now ;) did a dang good job of finding performance issues with my site, handling the huge size and various languages, platforms, and so forth. As I said, it worked well, but I wanted to look into making this more of a repeatable process.

I'm saying "repeatable", not "automated", on purpose here. I can automate the process, but a full performance review feels much more like something I should run when I think it makes sense, for example, when I know I've tweaked my blog at the 'code' level versus writing cat-related blogs. I do plan to look into automations with Cursor later, but for now, what I've done is something I'll run when I think it makes the most sense.

What's a skill again?

At the simplest level, a skill simply gives direction to an AI agent on how to perform a task. It also describes itself in such a way that your AI agent knows when to invoke the skill. This is done in a simple Markdown file that can, and probably should, be checked into your repo.

So for example, if I had a skill related to checking the health of my cat, my AI agent should be smart enough to recognize when it should use the skill based on my prompt. So for example:

• I'm worried about Donut's health, anything I can do?
• Sir Fluffalot is doing fine, but what steps can I do to ensure she's healthy?

That's a pretty quick summary but you get the idea. Where the benefit comes in is helping document and describe a process that you need to run again and again, or a process your organization/team/herd of cats needs to standardize on and wants to be consistent.

Turning my performance review into a skill

When I first did my performance review, I kept the prompt pretty simple. I did this on another machine so I don't have it in front of me, but I believe it was literally as simple as:

Review this site and tell me of any performance improvements you can find.

That generated the review I shared in my last post and guided my development.

Cursor provides a few ways to make skills:

• Since it's just a Markdown file, you can just make a file, old school like we did in the old days.
• Cursor has a skill to make skills: /create-skill i need a skill to help with cat care
• You can also just ask Cursor to do this in a prompt.

The last option is what I did, asking Cursor to make a skill like my prepublish one.

Cursor responded with:

A note on the last paragraph of the response. I had started my conversation with Cursor initially thinking I was going to automate it with a hook, but changed my mind. That's why it's mentioned here. The last bit "frontmatter trigger phrases" goes back to what I said earlier - a skill is both a guide on how to do something as well as a description of when it should be run.

The result was pretty astounding I think, specifically in how Cursor recognized the "engine" parts of my blog versus the "content" bits. It did this well in the one off so I'm not surprised, but I love having the various parts spelled out specifically in the skill itself. Like yesterday, I'll share the entire skill at the end, but let me talk a bit about what it did when I tried running it.

Running the Skill

When I ran the skill, I didn't expect it to find anything as my last commit was just a blog post. Cursor responded as such mentioning there was nothing staged. It noted two files that were dirty but not important:

I asked it to review the last two and it also noticed they didn't have anything relevant either - but what got me excited was that it went ahead and looked at one more and noted relevant changes there. Here's how that response ended:

Want me to precheck 1117ccc2 (or 1117ccc2 + 06626459 together)? That is where the meaningful review would be.

As I mentioned, I didn't do everything in the initial performance check, so I figured, why not, and I approved this scan. It noted two places I had used rss-parser and not yet added the timeout change so I went ahead and let Cursor make those changes as well.

The Skill

Here's the skill created by Cursor. Let me know what you think! Also, check out Cursor's docs on Skills - it's not just specific to Cursor and is a great reference in general.