What is skill-authoring?

A guide for creating and reviewing reusable instruction packages called skills, including their structure, usage triggers, documentation, and model assumptions.

Creating, revising, or evaluating .cursor/skills files and designing repeatable workflows for particular tasks or technical areas.

It helps keep agent instructions focused, reusable, and separate from general rules that should always apply.

skill-authoring — Cursor rule for Cursor by madebyaris

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.

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/madebyaris/advance-minimax-m3-cursor-rules

Made for: Cursor.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/madebyaris/advance-minimax-m3-cursor-rules/skill-authoring/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/rules/madebyaris/advance-minimax-m3-cursor-rules/skill-authoring)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/rules/madebyaris/advance-minimax-m3-cursor-rules/skill-authoring"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/madebyaris/advance-minimax-m3-cursor-rules/skill-authoring/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/rules/madebyaris/advance-minimax-m3-cursor-rules/skill-authoring"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/madebyaris/advance-minimax-m3-cursor-rules/skill-authoring.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 42 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.

When invoked 748 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00042	$0.00748
Opus 5	$0.00021	$0.00374
Sonnet 5	$0.00008	$0.00150
Haiku 4.5	$0.00004	$0.00075

Measured 10d ago against content hash 5e0d7152d2bc, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

skill-authoring 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 10d 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.

.cursor/rules/skill-authoring.mdc · 85 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 85 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Skill Authoring

Use this rule when creating, revising, or evaluating .cursor/skills/* content.

Rule vs Skill

Put durable, universal behavior in always-on rules.
Use a skill for repeatable workflows, domain-specific heuristics, or tasks that need examples and reference material.
If the content only matters for one file type or one domain, prefer a skill or requestable rule over expanding the core.

Skill Shape

Each skill should clearly provide:

what it is for
when to use it
what to inspect first
the workflow or decision sequence
any output or verification expectations

Frontmatter Contract

Use YAML frontmatter on every SKILL.md.

Minimum:

---
name: my-skill
description: >
  What this skill does and the user-language triggers for when to use it.
license: MIT
metadata:
  version: "1.0.0"
  category: workflow
  sources:
    - Official docs or standards
  model_assumptions: []   # optional; see below
---

Rules:

name must match the directory name exactly.
description must include concrete trigger language, not vague capability claims.
license should be explicit so skills stay portable outside this repo.
metadata.version should change when the skill meaningfully evolves.
metadata.category should describe the domain or workflow.
metadata.sources should name current authoritative sources when the skill depends on external behavior.
metadata.model_assumptions (optional) should name the model capabilities the skill depends on, e.g.:
- multimodal-input: required — the skill expects the user can attach images/video that the model can read natively
- long-context: recommended — the skill expects a 1M-class context window for the loader to be useful
- cursor-3-runtime: required — the skill expects the Cursor 3.7 / Agents Window surface

Progressive Disclosure

Keep SKILL.md focused on the main workflow.
Move large examples, extended references, and category catalogs into companion files such as reference.md.
Load deeper material only when the task actually needs it.

Read the full file on GitHub · 85 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.

10d ago First seen · 85 lines · 42 tokens per session scan A 5e0d7152d2bc

Subscribe to this mod's changes

skill-authoring is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository madebyaris/advance-minimax-m3-cursor-rules (125 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 42 tokens to every session and 748 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.

Building agents Code Generation agentic-ai ai-coding ai-workflow cursor cursor-ide

git-commit

Use this when the user asks for a git commit, commit message, or commit command.

kyungseo/ai-workflow-harness · 18 tokens

learnship

Activate learnship agentic engineering workflows — structured phases, persistent memory, learning partner, and impeccable UI design. Use whenever a user is working on a software project or asks about project planning, phases, workflows, or how to build something.

FavioVazquez/learnship · 48 tokens

skill-authoring