markitdown

I took a look at your markitdown skill and wanted to share some thoughts.

Links:

• GitHub
• Your agentic skill in the SkillzWave marketplace

TL;DR

You're at 62/100, which puts you in D territory. This is a solid foundation—your spec compliance is legitimately strong (12/15) and you've got great reference materials. The issue is that your skill feels bloated. You're repeating yourself constantly, burying the good stuff under redundancy, and missing some quick structural wins that would bump you up significantly.

What's Working Well

• Reference structure - You've got api_reference.md and file_formats.md properly separated, which is the right instinct for layered docs
• Concrete examples - Batch processing scripts, AI-enhanced conversion, scientific literature workflows—these are real use cases that show practical value
• Format coverage - Supporting 15+ formats (PDF, DOCX, XLSX, images with OCR, audio) gives this skill legitimate utility

The Big One: Content Duplication is Killing Your Token Economy

Your Progressive Disclosure Architecture score is 18/30 because you're repeating the same code examples 4+ times across SKILL.md and your references. The OpenRouter setup appears verbatim in multiple places. The PDF conversion flow shows up 5+ times.

Here's what's happening: someone reads SKILL.md (451 lines), gets the same info again in api_reference.md (400 lines), and still doesn't know where to find the one canonical example they need.

The fix: Restructure SKILL.md to show one clean example per concept, then defer to references/api_reference.md for the variations. For instance:

• SKILL.md: Show basic PDF conversion once, link to api_reference.md for "Advanced PDF Conversion with Azure Document Intelligence"
• SKILL.md: Show OpenRouter setup once, link for "Using Different AI Models" in references
• This cuts your SKILL.md roughly in half while making it way more navigable

Impact: +4 points minimum, gets you closer to 66-67.

Other Things Worth Fixing

1. Add a Table of Contents to long files - 451-line SKILL.md and 400-line api_reference.md need TOC sections. Users shouldn't have to scroll blind. (+3 points)

2. Your description needs trigger phrases - Right now it's generic: "Convert files and office documents to Markdown." Claude won't reliably activate this skill. Add: "Use when asked to 'convert to markdown', 'extract text from PDF', 'markitdown help', or 'prepare files for LLM processing.'" (+2 points)

3. No verification workflows - You show code, but nowhere do you say "check that result.text_content is not empty" or "verify tables have pipe characters." Add a "Verify Your Conversion" section with concrete checks. (+2 points)

4. Missing numbered quick-start - Your "Quick Start" jumps between installation, CLI, and Python API without a clear "do this, then this, then this" flow. Add numbered steps. (+2 points)

Quick Wins (In Order of Impact)

• De-duplicate content: move repeated examples to references → +4 points
• Add TOCs to long files → +3 points
• Include trigger phrases in description → +2 points
• Add verification steps to best practices → +2 points
• Numbered quick-start workflow → +2 points

These five fixes alone get you to 75+, moving you solidly into C territory.

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