Trae Skills: Recommended Portable & Future-Proof Setup

The Hybrid Philosophy

To maximize reuse today while staying almost completely free of lock-in tomorrow, many power users follow this pattern:

Define your core logic in plain, open-standard Markdown files inside your repo, then reference/link them to Trae's Skills system.

This way 90%+ of the value lives in Git-trackable files you fully control.

Step 1: Create Skills as Plain Markdown Files (the portable core)

Create a dedicated folder like skills/ or .skills/ in your repository.

Example folder structure:

skills/
├── code-review/
│   └── SKILL.md          ← main instructions file
├── test-generator/
│   └── SKILL.md
└── frontend-refactor/
    └── SKILL.md

Inside each SKILL.md, use this lightweight & widely-compatible format:

---
name: code-review
description: Perform a thorough, constructive code review following our team standards
keywords: review, critique, feedback
---

## Goal
Analyze the provided code diff/change and give structured, actionable feedback.

## Procedure
1. **Understand context** — Read the full change and related files if mentioned.
2. **Check standards** — Enforce naming, error handling, comments, security, performance.
3. **Structure output**:
   - Summary (1-2 sentences)
   - Positives
   - Issues (categorized: critical / medium / style)
   - Suggestions with code snippets
   - Questions for clarification

## Rules / Style
- Be kind and encouraging
- Use our project's naming conventions from agents.md
- Prioritize readability over cleverness

This format is human-readable, Git-friendly, and can be adapted to almost any AI tool in the future (Trae, Cursor, Aider, Claude, etc.).

Step 2: Import / Reference into Trae Skills

• In Trae → Settings → Rules & Skills: create new Skill and paste content from your SKILL.md
• Or use #Doc / #Context in chat: #Doc skills/code-review/SKILL.md
• For persistence: link via project rules with instructions like:
  "When user says 'review this', load and follow the procedure in skills/code-review/SKILL.md"

This keeps Trae using them natively while the source of truth stays in your repo.

Step 3: Backup & Portability Best Practices

• Commit the whole skills/ folder into Git
• When switching IDEs/projects/tools → just copy the folder
• Test portability periodically by pasting into Cursor, Claude Artifacts, plain ChatGPT, etc.
• Version your skills: add version: 1.0 in frontmatter
• Optional: follow emerging patterns like .github/skills/

Quick Wins for Trae-Specific Usage

• Start small: 3–5 high-value skills (e.g. refactor-to-clean-code, write-unit-tests-tdd, api-design-review)
• Invoke naturally: "Use code-review skill on this diff"
• Combine with agents.md: prefer loading from skills/ when skill name is mentioned

Result: maximum reuse in Trae today + near-zero lock-in tomorrow.