using-agent-skills

using-agent-skills is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from addyosmani/agent-skills. It costs 54 tokens per session (2,208 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

Guidance for finding and applying the right agent skill for each stage of software work.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it at the start of a session or whenever you need to decide which available skill should guide the work.
Why use it?
It helps choose an appropriate process when a task involves planning, implementation, testing, documentation, or another development phase.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Part of the agent-skills plugin — 25 skills, 10 commands, 4 agents, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it at the start of a session or whenever you need to decide which available skill should guide the work.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/addyosmani/agent-skills/using-agent-skills
About the project

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.

addyosmani/agent-skills · 93,102 stars · on GitHub · skills.addy.ie

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.

Any agent
npx skills add addyosmani/agent-skills --skill using-agent-skills
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/addyosmani/agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install agent-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 25 skills, 10 commands, 4 agents, 1 hook.

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.

agentmods badge for using-agent-skills

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/addyosmani/agent-skills/using-agent-skills/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/addyosmani/agent-skills/using-agent-skills)
Your own site
<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.

agentmods 80×15 button for using-agent-skills

Your own site · 80×15
<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>
Per session 54 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,208 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. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 16 May 2026
  • Snyk pass 16 May 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
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.
How audits are shown
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 5.1 $0.00054 $0.02208
Opus 5 $0.00027 $0.01104
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00442
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00221

Measured today against content hash 30787ef2c77b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

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 today.

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

8 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

skills/using-agent-skills/SKILL.md · 193 lines

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

Read the full file on GitHub · 193 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. today Changed · +6 tokens per session 30787ef2c77b
  2. 10d ago First seen · 193 lines · 48 tokens per session scan A 8bdbecb2f98c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

using-agent-skills is a skill published in the GitHub repository addyosmani/agent-skills (93,102 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 54 tokens to every session and 2,208 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 2026-08-30.

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