skill-authoring

skill-authoring is a skill for Claude Code from athola/claude-night-market. It costs 22 tokens per session (2,305 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for creating Claude Code skills, which are instruction packages that change how the coding assistant handles specific tasks. It uses test-driven development (TDD), meaning you write a failing test first and then improve the instructions until the test passes.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when developing a new Claude Code skill, documenting its behavior, defining limits and completion conditions, and testing whether it improves assistant performance.
Why use it?
It helps skill authors base changes on observed assistant failures instead of guesswork. It also explains how to make skills easier to discover and keep their instructions manageable.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR} variable. Also seen: mentions subagents; mentions Claude Code.

Part of the abstract plugin — 16 skills, 17 commands, 5 agents, 4 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it when developing a new Claude Code skill, documenting its behavior, defining limits and completion conditions, and testing whether it improves assistant performance.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/athola/claude-night-market/skill-authoring
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 athola/claude-night-market --skill skill-authoring
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/athola/claude-night-market

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install abstract, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 16 skills, 17 commands, 5 agents, 4 hooks.

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 skill-authoring

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/athola/claude-night-market/skill-authoring/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/athola/claude-night-market/skill-authoring)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/athola/claude-night-market/skill-authoring"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/athola/claude-night-market/skill-authoring/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 skill-authoring

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/athola/claude-night-market/skill-authoring"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/athola/claude-night-market/skill-authoring.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 22 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,305 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
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
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 $0.00022 $0.02305
Opus 5 $0.00011 $0.01153
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00461
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00231

Measured 12d ago against content hash 954fa29a5448, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

skill-authoring 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 12d 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.

plugins/abstract/skills/skill-authoring/SKILL.md · 204 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 204 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Skill Authoring Guide

When NOT To Use

  • Scoring a skill that already exists (use abstract:skills-eval)
  • Authoring a hook (use abstract:hook-authoring)
  • Verifying the skill fires (use abstract:subagent-testing)

Overview

Writing effective Claude Code skills requires Test-Driven Development (TDD) and persuasion principles from compliance research. We treat skill writing as process documentation that needs empirical validation rather than just theoretical instruction. Skills are behavioral interventions designed to change model behavior in measurable ways.

By using TDD, we ensure skills address actual failure modes identified through testing. Optimized descriptions improve discovery, while a modular structure supports progressive disclosure to manage token usage. It states intent, constraints and exit criteria, and leaves the path between them to the session doing the work. modules/persuasion-principles.md carries the strength budget that decides which of the three each statement is.

The Iron Law

NO SKILL WITHOUT A FAILING TEST FIRST

Every skill must begin with documented evidence of Claude failing without it. This validates that you are solving a real problem. No implementation should proceed without a failing test, and no completion claim should be accepted without evidence. Detailed enforcement patterns for adversarial verification and coverage gates are available in imbue:proof-of-work.

Skill Types

We categorize skills into three types: Technique skills for specific methods, Pattern skills for recurring solutions, and Reference skills for quick lookups and checklists. This helps organize interventions into the most effective format for the task.

Quick Start

Skill Analysis

```bash

Analyze skill complexity

python scripts/skill_analyzer.py

Estimate tokens

python scripts/token_estimator.py ```

Validation

```bash

Validate skill structure

python scripts/abstract_validator.py --check ```

Read the full file on GitHub · 204 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. 12d ago First seen · 204 lines · 22 tokens per session scan A 954fa29a5448

Subscribe to this mod's changes

skill-authoring is a skill published in the GitHub repository athola/claude-night-market (337 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 22 tokens to every session and 2,305 once invoked, about $0.0001 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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