addyosmani/agent-skills is a collection of reusable workflows, quality checks, commands, and other instructions that guide AI coding agents through software development. It is for developers who want agents to follow consistent engineering practices, and the catalogue entries are its packaged skills, commands, agents, plugins, instructions, and hooks.
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.
npx skills add addyosmani/agent-skills --skill using-agent-skillsgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/addyosmani/agent-skillsWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/addyosmani/agent-skills/using-agent-skills)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/addyosmani/agent-skills/using-agent-skills"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/addyosmani/agent-skills/using-agent-skills/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/addyosmani/agent-skills/using-agent-skills"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/addyosmani/agent-skills/using-agent-skills.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- Socket pass
- Snyk pass
- NVIDIA SkillSpector warn
SkillSpector: 2 findings, up to medium
These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →
- medium Excessive Agency · line 120 Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
- medium Excessive Agency · line 135 Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
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 | $0.00054 | $0.02208 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00022 | $0.00883 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00011 | $0.00442 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00221 |
Grade A, and why
using-agent-skills 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 1mo 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.
Copies of this mod
8 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:
- using-agent-skills — 100% identical, 5 lines differ
- using-agent-skills — 100% identical, 5 lines differ
- using-agent-skills — 98% identical, 0 lines differ
- using-agent-skills — 97% identical, 1 lines differ
- using-agent-skills — 94% identical, 5 lines differ
- using-agent-skills — 94% identical, 50 lines differ
- using-agent-skills — 94% identical, 45 lines differ
- using-awesome-ai-skills — 94% identical, 24 lines differ
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 193 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Using Agent Skills
Overview
Agent Skills is a collection of engineering workflow skills organized by development phase. Each skill encodes a specific process that senior engineers follow. This meta-skill helps you discover and apply the right skill for your current task.
Skill Discovery
When a task arrives, identify the development phase and apply the corresponding skill:
Task arrives
│
├── Don't know what you want yet? ──────→ interview-me
├── Have a rough concept, need variants? → idea-refine
├── New project/feature/change? ──→ spec-driven-development
├── No quality bar written down? ──→ constraint-driven-development
├── Have a spec, need tasks? ──────→ planning-and-task-breakdown
├── Implementing code? ────────────→ incremental-implementation
│ ├── UI work? ─────────────────→ frontend-ui-engineering
│ ├── API work? ────────────────→ api-and-interface-design
│ ├── Need better context? ─────→ context-engineering
│ ├── Need doc-verified code? ───→ source-driven-development
│ └── Stakes high / unfamiliar code? ──→ doubt-driven-development
├── Writing/running tests? ────────→ test-driven-development
│ └── Browser-based? ───────────→ browser-testing-with-devtools
├── Something broke? ──────────────→ debugging-and-error-recovery
├── Reviewing code? ───────────────→ code-review-and-quality
│ ├── Too complex? ─────────────→ code-simplification
│ ├── Security concerns? ───────→ security-and-hardening
│ └── Performance concerns? ────→ performance-optimization
├── Committing/branching? ─────────→ git-workflow-and-versioning
├── CI/CD pipeline work? ──────────→ ci-cd-and-automation
├── Deprecating/migrating? ────────→ deprecation-and-migration
├── Writing docs/ADRs? ───────────→ documentation-and-adrs
├── Adding logs/metrics/alerts? ───→ observability-and-instrumentation
└── Deploying/launching? ─────────→ shipping-and-launch
Core Operating Behaviors
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.
- 1mo ago Changed · +6 tokens per session 30787ef2c77b
- 1mo ago First seen · 193 lines · 48 tokens per session scan A 8bdbecb2f98c
using-agent-skills is a skill published in the GitHub repository addyosmani/agent-skills (110,515 stars, last pushed 12d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 54 tokens to every session and 2,208 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.
Other skills, from other repositories
ai-output-validation
Validates, parses, and sanitizes AI-generated outputs before they reach end users or downstream systems. Structured output enforcement, schema validation, and fallback handling.
think-before-coding
Forces explicit reasoning before writing any code. Surfaces assumptions, manages confusion, and prevents hallucination by demanding clarity upfront.
git-workflow
Trunk-based development with atomic commits, clean history, and meaningful commit messages. Every commit should be deployable.
meeting-notes-to-tasks
Converts unstructured meeting notes into structured, assigned, time-bounded action items. Never leave a meeting without knowing who does what by when.
idea-to-spec
Converts vague ideas into concrete, testable specifications with acceptance criteria. No implementation begins without a spec.
debugging-methodology
Systematic root cause analysis for production and development bugs. Hypothesis-driven debugging — never guess-and-check.