claude-skills CLAUDE.md

Project instructions for creating and maintaining Claude skills, which are reusable instruction sets for an AI coding assistant. They define description, frontmatter, and reference-file standards.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use them when configuring the claude-skills project, writing skill descriptions, checking required metadata, or preparing reference files.
Why use it?
They prevent skill descriptions from hiding important instructions by putting workflow steps in the wrong place.

Instructions file

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 instructions/jeffallan/claude-skills/claude-md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Jeffallan/claude-skills
Per session 2,588 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 2,588 The same file — it is already loaded in full.
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 $0.02588 $0.02588
Opus 5 $0.01294 $0.01294
Sonnet 5 $0.00518 $0.00518
Haiku 4.5 $0.00259 $0.00259

Measured yesterday against content hash bc08b9c87612, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

claude-skills CLAUDE.md 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 yesterday.

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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

CLAUDE.md · 312 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 312 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Claude Skills Project Configuration

This file governs Claude's behavior when working on the claude-skills repository.


Skill Authorship Standards

Skills follow the Agent Skills specification. This section covers project-specific conventions that go beyond the base spec.

The Description Trap

Critical: Never put process steps or workflow sequences in descriptions. When descriptions contain step-by-step instructions, agents follow the brief description instead of reading the full skill content. This defeats the purpose of detailed skills.

Brief capability statements (what it does) and trigger conditions (when to use it) are both appropriate. Process steps (how it works) are not.

BAD - Process steps in description:

description: Use for debugging. First investigate root cause, then analyze
patterns, test hypotheses, and implement fixes with tests.

GOOD - Capability + trigger:

description: Diagnoses bugs through root cause analysis and pattern matching.
Use when encountering errors or unexpected behavior requiring investigation.

Format: [Brief capability statement]. Use when [triggering conditions].

Descriptions tell WHAT the skill does and WHEN to use it. The SKILL.md body tells HOW.


Frontmatter Requirements

Per the Agent Skills specification, only name and description are top-level required fields. Custom fields go under metadata.

---
name: skill-name-with-hyphens
description: [Brief capability statement]. Use when [triggering conditions] - max 1024 chars
license: MIT
metadata:
  author: https://github.com/Jeffallan
  version: "1.0.0"
  domain: frontend
  triggers: keyword1, keyword2, keyword3
  role: specialist
  scope: implementation
  output-format: code
  related-skills: fullstack-guardian, test-master, devops-engineer
---

Top-level fields (spec-defined):

  • name: Letters, numbers, and hyphens only (no parentheses or special characters)
  • description: Maximum 1024 characters. Capability statement + trigger conditions. No process steps.
  • license: Always MIT for this project
  • allowed-tools: Space-delimited tool list (only on skills that restrict tools)

Read the full file on GitHub · 312 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. yesterday First seen · 312 lines · 2,588 tokens per session scan A bc08b9c87612

Subscribe to this mod's changes

claude-skills CLAUDE.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository Jeffallan/claude-skills (11,250 stars, last pushed 24d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 2,588 tokens to every session, about $0.0129 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 2026-08-30.

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