Agent Development

Guidance for developing agents, including their structure, instructions, available tools, and conditions for being selected.

In plain words
What is it for?
Creating agents and subagents, writing their system prompts, setting trigger descriptions, choosing tools, and defining agent metadata such as colors.
Why use it?
An agent needs clear behavior and activation rules to be useful. This guidance helps define those parts consistently.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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 skills/anthropics/claude-code/agent-development
Any agent
npx skills add anthropics/claude-code --skill agent-development
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 80 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,484 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin unknown 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 $0.00080 $0.02484
Opus 5 $0.00040 $0.01242
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00497
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00248

Measured 2d ago against content hash ff3324078bbe, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

Agent Development 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 2d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/validate-agent.sh), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

plugins/plugin-dev/skills/agent-development/SKILL.md · 416 lines

The source is not reproduced here

No licence file

A repository with no LICENSE is all rights reserved by default, so the body is not copied here. The metadata, the measurements and the link are.

Read it on GitHub

Files

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.

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. 2d ago First seen · 416 lines · 80 tokens per session scan A ff3324078bbe

Subscribe to this mod's changes

Agent Development is a skill published in the GitHub repository anthropics/claude-code (143,632 stars, last pushed today), with no licence file. It adds 80 tokens to every session and 2,484 once invoked, about $0.0004 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories