On the Philosophical Meaning of Skills

0. Introduction #

Once you put an agent into real work, you quickly find that what it most often gets stuck on isn’t “not being able to think,” but “not having worked in this organization.” The default structure, tone, and review focus your team expects for the same report; which checks are hard rules vs. hard-earned priorities for the same deployment; which information can never be sent out and which wording must be retained in external communication—these things usually aren’t in public knowledge, and they aren’t in model parameters either. They live in an organization’s conventions, checklists, incident postmortems, and apprenticeship-style knowledge transfer.

From Action to Situation: A New Workplace Capability Model for the AI Era

Recently, in a training course, the instructor was introducing the STAR framework (Situation, Task, Action, Result). After she finished, she asked me:

“If you had to rank the four elements of STAR by importance, how would you rank them?”

In true ENTP fashion, I wasn’t going to answer obediently. I tossed the question back: “Then what’s your internal ranking?”

She thought for a moment and said: “Usually we look at A → T → R → S. We mainly care about what you did (Action). As for Situation, it often overlaps with Task…”