authoring-dags

authoring-dags is a skill for Claude Code from astronomer/agents. It costs 93 tokens per session (1,596 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A guide for writing Apache Airflow DAGs, which are code-defined workflows made of scheduled tasks and their dependencies. It covers the process from understanding the project through implementation and validation.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create DAGs, write pipeline code, add downstream tasks, follow Airflow patterns, and validate the result.
Why use it?
It helps keep new or changed pipelines consistent with project practices and catches workflow problems before deployment.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: hooks in frontmatter.

Part of the astronomer-data plugin — 35 skills, 3 commands shipped together

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/astronomer/agents/authoring-dags
Any agent
npx skills add astronomer/agents --skill authoring-dags
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/astronomer/agents

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install astronomer-data, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 35 skills, 3 commands.

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 authoring-dags

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/astronomer/agents/authoring-dags.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/astronomer/agents/authoring-dags)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/astronomer/agents/authoring-dags"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/astronomer/agents/authoring-dags.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 93 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,596 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00093 $0.01596
Opus 5 $0.00046 $0.00798
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00319
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00160

Measured 6d ago against content hash fdc043b57914, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

authoring-dags 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 6d 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

2 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

skills/authoring-dags/SKILL.md · 229 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 229 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

DAG Authoring Skill

This skill guides you through creating and validating Airflow DAGs using best practices and af CLI commands.

For testing and debugging DAGs, see the testing-dags skill which covers the full test -> debug -> fix -> retest workflow.


Running the CLI

These commands assume af is on PATH. Run via astro otto to get it automatically, or install standalone with uv tool install astro-airflow-mcp.


Workflow Overview

+-----------------------------------------+
| 1. DISCOVER                             |
|    Understand codebase & environment    |
+-----------------------------------------+
                 |
+-----------------------------------------+
| 2. PLAN                                 |
|    Propose structure, get approval      |
+-----------------------------------------+
                 |
+-----------------------------------------+
| 3. IMPLEMENT                            |
|    Write DAG following patterns         |
+-----------------------------------------+
                 |
+-----------------------------------------+
| 4. VALIDATE                             |
|    Check import errors, warnings        |
+-----------------------------------------+
                 |
+-----------------------------------------+
| 5. TEST (with user consent)             |
|    Trigger, monitor, check logs         |
+-----------------------------------------+
                 |
+-----------------------------------------+
| 6. ITERATE                              |
|    Fix issues, re-validate              |
+-----------------------------------------+

Phase 1: Discover

Before writing code, understand the context.

Explore the Codebase

Use file tools to find existing patterns:

  • Glob for **/dags/**/*.py to find existing DAGs
  • Read similar DAGs to understand conventions
  • Check requirements.txt for available packages

Query the Airflow Environment

Use af CLI commands to understand what's available:

Read the full file on GitHub · 229 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 6d ago First seen · 229 lines · 93 tokens per session scan A fdc043b57914

Subscribe to this mod's changes

authoring-dags is a skill published in the GitHub repository astronomer/agents (435 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 93 tokens to every session and 1,596 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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