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 afaraha8403/balakit --skill authoring-skills-and-rulesgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/afaraha8403/balakitWrote 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/afaraha8403/balakit/authoring-skills-and-rules)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/afaraha8403/balakit/authoring-skills-and-rules"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/afaraha8403/balakit/authoring-skills-and-rules/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/afaraha8403/balakit/authoring-skills-and-rules"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/afaraha8403/balakit/authoring-skills-and-rules.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>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 | $0.00156 | $0.03894 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00078 | $0.01947 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00031 | $0.00779 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00016 | $0.00389 |
Grade A, and why
authoring-skills-and-rules 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 322 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Authoring Skills and Rules (cross-platform)
Leading words: progressive disclosure, context pointer, token budget, Apply-when description, playbook todos, skip reason, leading words, phase separation, encode lessons in structure, deletion test.
A practitioner's guide to writing and maintaining the two artifact families that steer coding agents — Skills (on-demand, procedural capabilities) and Rules / instructions (standing context) — across Claude Code, Cursor, OpenCode, Codex, and GitHub Copilot.
Trigger: /authoring-skills-and-rules, or any request to write, port, or
review a Skill or rule. If the target platform(s) are unstated, ask before
scaffolding — the file layout differs per platform.
This skill carries the per-platform exact details in references/ (loaded on
demand). The body below is the decision model + the universal craft + a
phase-separated workflow.
The one decision that comes first: Skill vs Rule
Pick the artifact by how the behavior should load, not by topic.
Skill (SKILL.md) |
Rule / instructions | |
|---|---|---|
| Loads | On demand — only when the task matches its description |
Standing — always, or auto-attached by file glob |
| Cost | ~Free until triggered (only the description is always in context) | Taxes every request it applies to |
| Best for | Multi-step procedures, reusable workflows, domain playbooks | Project facts, coding standards, guardrails, style |
| Analogy | A specialist you call in | House rules pinned to the wall |
| Portable as | One folder, near-identical across 4 of 5 platforms | Format differs sharply per platform |
Rules of thumb:
- Procedure or workflow → Skill. If it has steps, checkpoints, or scripts.
- Always-true fact or guardrail → Rule. "We use Vitest", "never commit secrets", "this repo is a monorepo".
- A standing block that grew past a few paragraphs and became procedural →
graduate it from the rule/
CLAUDE.mdinto a Skill. - One capability per Skill. If the description needs "and" to cover unrelated jobs, split it.
What ships with it
6 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.
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.
- today Changed · +36 lines · +24 tokens per session ba1218707a3e
- 11d ago First seen · 286 lines · 132 tokens per session scan A bf860a0f1075
authoring-skills-and-rules is a skill published in the GitHub repository afaraha8403/balakit (1 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 156 tokens to every session and 3,894 once invoked, about $0.0008 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.
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