excellence-skill-creator

excellence-skill-creator is a skill for Claude Code from bengous/claude-code-plugins. It costs 86 tokens per session (2,966 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for creating strongly opinionated skills that make coding-agent output more deliberate and less generic. It focuses on encoding design judgment and naming common bad patterns.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create skills for areas such as frontend design, command-line interfaces, or system architecture.
Why use it?
It helps turn expert preferences into reusable instructions instead of producing broad advice that does not meaningfully shape the result.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions Claude Code.

Part of the software-craft plugin — 5 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to create skills for areas such as frontend design, command-line interfaces, or system architecture.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/bengous/claude-code-plugins/excellence-skill-creator
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 bengous/claude-code-plugins --skill excellence-skill-creator
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bengous/claude-code-plugins

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install software-craft, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 5 skills.

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 excellence-skill-creator

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bengous/claude-code-plugins/excellence-skill-creator/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/bengous/claude-code-plugins/excellence-skill-creator)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bengous/claude-code-plugins/excellence-skill-creator"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bengous/claude-code-plugins/excellence-skill-creator/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 excellence-skill-creator

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bengous/claude-code-plugins/excellence-skill-creator"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bengous/claude-code-plugins/excellence-skill-creator.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 86 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,966 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.
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 $0.00086 $0.02966
Opus 5 $0.00043 $0.01483
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00593
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00297

Measured 8d ago against content hash ec6a595abd6d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

excellence-skill-creator 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 8d 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.

software-craft/skills/excellence-skill-creator/SKILL.md · 313 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 313 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Design-excellence skills transform Claude from a generic pattern-matcher into an opinionated craftsperson. A skill without strong opinions is just documentation with delusions of grandeur.

The user provides a domain (e.g., "API design", "error messages", "database schemas") and context about what makes generic output unacceptable. If they can't articulate why generic output fails, help them find that angle first—it's the foundation of everything that follows.

<excellence_philosophy>

Philosophy: What Makes a Design-Excellence Skill

A design-excellence skill without these five traits is just documentation pretending to have opinions:

  1. Force intentional choices: Make Claude commit to a direction before touching the keyboard. Intentional choices produce distinctive output; default choices produce forgettable output.

  2. Encode taste, not just rules: Rules tell you what's legal. Taste tells you what's good. Your skill transmits the judgment of someone who has failed enough times to know what actually matters.

  3. Name the anti-patterns: Claude knows thousands of patterns. Tell it which ones are tired, overused, or inappropriate for this context. The anti-patterns block is often the most valuable section—it's where your hard-won experience becomes actionable guidance.

  4. Define done: Success criteria prevent the "good enough" trap. If you can't measure it, Claude will satisfice. Measurable outcomes distinguish excellent from adequate.

  5. Match complexity to context: A TODO app doesn't need microservices. A landing page doesn't need a design system. A skill that over-engineers simple cases teaches Claude to over-engineer everything.

If your skill reads like it could have been written by anyone, it will produce output that could have been written by anyone. Encode your opinions explicitly. </excellence_philosophy>

<excellence_workflow>

Workflow: Scaffold → Craft → Audit

This skill orchestrates a 3-pass workflow for maximum skill quality.

Read the full file on GitHub · 313 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. 8d ago First seen · 313 lines · 86 tokens per session scan A ec6a595abd6d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

excellence-skill-creator is a skill published in the GitHub repository bengous/claude-code-plugins (4 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 86 tokens to every session and 2,966 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 2026-09-03.

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