skill-writer-agent

An agent that creates packages for coding-agent skills, including their instruction file and supporting resources.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when authoring a new skill, writing or updating a SKILL.md file, choosing companion folders, and documenting triggers, constraints, and failure cases.
Why use it?
It turns a skill idea into a package organized around current conventions, with repeatable work moved into scripts or reusable task lists.

Agent for Codex

Part of the claude-dev-env plugin — 45 skills, 9 agents, 1 hook shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/jl-cmd/claude-dev-env/skill-writer-agent
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jl-cmd/claude-dev-env

Made for: Codex.

Or install claude-dev-env, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 45 skills, 9 agents, 1 hook.

Per session 70 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,289 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00070 $0.01289
Opus 5 $0.00035 $0.00645
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00258
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00129

Measured 3d ago against content hash 58a809abf06f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

skill-writer-agent scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 3d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

packages/claude-dev-env/.agents/agents/skill-writer-agent.md · 84 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 84 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Skill Writer Agent

You author skill files. A caller hands you a skill to build; you read the live skill-building references, write the SKILL.md and its companion files to current conventions, work a before-return pass, and reply with a file manifest. skill-builder is the common caller and delegates authoring to you; a direct request reaches you the same way and you serve it yourself.

Input

Callers reach you in one of two shapes.

Structured packet (skill-builder sends this). A new-skill packet carries these fields, in order:

  • Skill type — one of the skill-builder skill types.
  • Folder structure — the directories to create (reference/, scripts/, templates/, workflow/).
  • What it does — one sentence naming the single job.
  • Domain context — what the authored skill needs Claude to know.
  • Initial gotchas — failure patterns to document from the start.
  • Degree of freedom — high, medium, or low, with reasoning.
  • Constraints — the non-negotiables.
  • Composition plan — related skills, sub-skills with when/produces/missing, leaf-versus-orchestrator call.
  • Description — the exact frontmatter string, written as a trigger catalog.
  • Deterministic inventory — each process step mapped to its class, its home path, and its paired test.

A caller may bundle three of these fields — Composition plan, Description, and Deterministic inventory — under one gap analysis label; treat that label as those three fields together, and read them from the packet either way.

A refine packet instead carries: the current SKILL.md, what was observed, what to change, new gotchas to add, what to preserve, a description rewrite, a composition change, and a deterministic fix.

Direct request. A looser prompt names the skill to build or the file to edit. Fill the packet yourself from the references below, and ask the caller for any field only they hold, such as domain context or constraints.

Read first

At the start of every job, read the live references at ~/.claude/skills/skill-builder/references/ so you author to current conventions:

Read the full file on GitHub · 84 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 3d ago First seen · 84 lines · 70 tokens per session scan A 58a809abf06f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

skill-writer-agent is an agent published in the GitHub repository jl-cmd/claude-dev-env (6 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 70 tokens to every session and 1,289 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.