Skills You Can Learn Today

Set Up Cursor Automations (intermediate) — Event-driven agents from PagerDuty/GitHub/Slack triggers with isolated sandboxes. Cursor Blog

Apply Context Engineering to Cut Agent Costs 60-80% (advanced) — Hierarchical token budgets, dynamic tool filtering (max 15), automatic compaction at 70%. Maxim AI

Mitigate Context Rot in RAG Systems (intermediate) — Chroma's study: maintain 0.7+ needle-question similarity, minimize distractors, front-load critical info, experiment with context shuffling. Chroma Research

Build Event-Driven Multi-Agent Systems with Kafka (advanced) — Four patterns (orchestrator-worker, hierarchical, blackboard, market-based) as Kafka consumer groups. Confluent

Hoard Working Examples for Agent Recombination (beginner) — Willison's core insight: every working code example becomes a composable building block. Two examples + one prompt = new tool. Simon Willison

Implement OWASP Secure MCP Server Checklist (intermediate) — OAuth 2.1, session isolation, JSON Schema validation, container isolation, TLS, tool description integrity verification. OWASP

Audit MCP Servers with SlowMist Checklist (intermediate) — Five-layer audit: UI/host, client, server/plugin, multi-MCP collaboration, domain-specific. Test with MasterMCP. SlowMist GitHub

Train Hybrid Transformer-RNN Models (advanced) — OLMo Hybrid's 3:1 GDN/attention pattern for 2x data efficiency. Deploy with VLLM workarounds. Interconnects

Build Outcome-Based Pricing for AI SaaS (intermediate) — Six pricing models from usage-based to outcome-based. Start with hybrid subscription + overage. Use Lago or Stripe Billing. Lago

Build Enterprise Agent Governance Framework (intermediate) — Four-dimension assessment, decision hierarchies, cost controls, agent registry. Prevent the 40% cancellation rate Gartner predicts. Gartner