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Meta-Skill Routing Table

Run the Meta-Skill Routing Table MicroSim Fullscreen

About This MicroSim

A meta-skill does not do the task itself. Its job is to route a request to one of several detailed guides and load only that guide. This left-to-right flowchart follows one request through the microsim-generator meta-skill:

  1. An Incoming Request reaches the microsim-generator (Meta-Skill).
  2. The meta-skill consults its Trigger Keyword Table.
  3. The table fans out to five guides. Each edge is labeled with keywords that route there.

Type a request in the box and select Route. The MicroSim looks for trigger keywords in your text, highlights the matching route in the diagram, dims the four guides that are not loaded, and marks the matching row of the table below.

Guide Example trigger keywords Produces
p5.js Guide simulation, physics, interactive Custom simulations and animations
Chart.js Guide chart, bar, pie Standard data charts
vis-network Guide network, nodes, edges Network graphs and concept maps
Mermaid Guide flowchart, workflow Flowcharts and process diagrams
Timeline Guide timeline, dates, events Chronological displays

A five-guide excerpt with simplified matching

The keywords are the real trigger keywords for these five guides in the microsim-generator skill. The full skill routes among more guides than the five shown here. The MicroSim picks the guide with the most keyword matches, which is a simplification. The real meta-skill is read by a language model, which weighs the whole request rather than counting words.

How to Use

  1. The first example is already routed. Find the highlighted path and the highlighted table row.
  2. Pick another request from the Examples list and compare which keywords matched.
  3. Pick Create a graph of our sales data. Two rows match equally, so the request is ambiguous. Read what the real meta-skill does in that case.
  4. Type your own request and select Route (or press Enter). Try one with no trigger keyword at all.
  5. Click any box in the diagram for its definition. Clicking a guide highlights the edge and table row that lead to it.

Iframe Embed Code

You can add this MicroSim to any web page by adding this to your HTML:

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<iframe src="https://dmccreary.github.io/ibook-skills/sims/meta-skill-routing-table/main.html"
        height="552px"
        width="100%"
        scrolling="no"></iframe>

Lesson Plan

Audience

Adult learners, educators, and instructional designers who use this skill library and want to understand how one skill can stand in for many.

Learning Objective

Demonstrate how a meta-skill's routing table matches a request's trigger keywords to exactly one on-demand guide. (Bloom's Taxonomy: Apply)

Duration

10 minutes

Prerequisites

  • Knows what a skill is and how an agent chooses one from its description
  • Has read the definitions of meta-skill, skill routing table, and on-demand guide loading in Chapter 7

Activities

  1. Exploration (3 min): Route all six example requests. For each, name the guide that loads and the keywords that caused it.
  2. Guided Practice (4 min): Write one new request for each of the five guides without reusing the example wording. Route each one and check that it lands where you intended.
  3. Assessment (3 min): Rewrite the ambiguous request Create a graph of our sales data two ways: once so it routes to the Chart.js Guide, and once so it routes to the vis-network Guide. Explain what you changed.

Assessment

  • The learner predicts the guide a request will load before routing it.
  • The learner states that only the matched guide is loaded and the others cost nothing for that request.
  • The learner resolves an ambiguous request by adding a more specific trigger keyword.

Discussion Questions

  1. Why is it cheaper to keep five guides behind one meta-skill than to install five separate skills?
  2. What goes wrong if two rows of a routing table share the same keyword?
  3. How would you choose trigger keywords for a new guide?

References

  1. Flowcharts Syntax - Mermaid - Documentation for the flowchart syntax and the click interaction used in this MicroSim.
  2. Agent Skills - Anthropic - Vendor documentation on skills and on loading instructions only when they are needed.
  3. Routing table - Wikipedia - The networking idea the term borrows from: a lookup table that sends each item to one destination.