Skill Feedback Cycle

An iterative quality loop for improving Claude Code skills: invoke → watch → give feedback → skill updates itself → repeat. Step 6 of the Six Step Skill Building Framework, and the mechanism by which a skill that initially produces generic output converges on production-grade output over 10–30 runs.

Key points

• Each cycle: invoke the skill, watch it work, identify what to correct, give feedback, skill updates its own SKILL.md ^[src-013]
• "The first couple times you run a skill, you may feel like it's very AI generated. But by the time you've run that skill 10, 20, 30 times, every single time it gets better." ^[src-013]
• The skill itself should contain the feedback-loop instruction — asking the human for a quality score and patch notes at end of each run ^[src-013]
• This is an application of the Curiosity Rule: never accept output passively; always interrogate why it made the choices it did ^[src-013]
• In Hermes, Nate frames skills as the "how to do it again" half of the assistant. If the user corrects Hermes on the same workflow repeatedly, the correction should become a skill or a skill patch rather than another one-off prompt ^[src-074].
• Hermes can create, update, and discover skills through the skills hub/community pattern, but Nate still treats human review as necessary because trigger frontmatter and procedural detail determine whether the right skill fires ^[src-074].

Related concepts

• Six Step Skill Building Framework — parent framework; this is step 6
• Curiosity Rule — mindset prerequisite for using this cycle effectively
• Aios Daily Loop — the daily cadence that surfaces improvement opportunities
• Progressive Context Loading — what the skill file contains that gets updated each cycle
• Hermes Five Pillar Agent Architecture
• Agent Harness Portability

Source references

• ^[src-013] Nate Herk — "Build & Sell Claude Code Operating Systems (2+ Hour Course)" (2026-05-01)
• ^[src-074] Nate Herk — "Hermes Agent: Zero to Personal AI Assistant (1 Hour Course)" (2026-05-10)