How is a skill different from a prompt?

Conflating the two is the most common structural mistake in AI deployments. When behavioural rules are written into prompts, they compete with everything else in the prompt on position and phrasing, and each new prompt must restate them — so the rules drift, and coverage depends on whoever wrote each prompt remembering.

Centralpoint separates them. Skills are pre-indexed behavioural rules loading in five fixed tiers — governance, behavioural, syntactic, domain, style — with governance first and force-loadable. Prompts declare which skills they require. A rule established once governs every prompt that loads it, rather than being restated in each and drifting apart.