generate-agent-skills

generate-agent-skills is a skill for Claude Code from canonical/copilot-collections. It costs 34 tokens per session (2,719 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A guided process for creating or updating Agent Skills, which are instruction packages that teach an AI agent how to handle a particular type of work.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to design, generate, scaffold, and validate a new skill or changes to an existing one.
Why use it?
It reduces the chance of missing required files, steps, or quality checks when building a skill. It requires scaffolding and validation scripts to keep the result consistent.

Skill for Claude Code ✓ vendor

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Good fit Use it to design, generate, scaffold, and validate a new skill or changes to an existing one.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/canonical/copilot-collections/generate-agent-skills
About the project

Canonical Copilot Collections is a repository for organizing and distributing GitHub Copilot instructions, prompts, agents, and skills across Canonical repositories. Teams configure repositories to subscribe to shared collections, such as Python, documentation, or Juju development guidance, and keep those assets synchronized.

canonical/copilot-collections · 29 stars · on GitHub

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 canonical/copilot-collections --skill generate-agent-skills
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/canonical/copilot-collections

Made for: Claude Code.

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 generate-agent-skills

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/canonical/copilot-collections/generate-agent-skills/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/canonical/copilot-collections/generate-agent-skills)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/canonical/copilot-collections/generate-agent-skills"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/canonical/copilot-collections/generate-agent-skills/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 generate-agent-skills

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/canonical/copilot-collections/generate-agent-skills"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/canonical/copilot-collections/generate-agent-skills.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 34 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,719 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 warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 2 findings, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high Rogue Agent · line 190
    Skill modifies its own code, configuration, or behavior at runtime. Self-modification enables an agent to escalate privileges, disable safety constraints, or install persistent backdoors.
    Fix: Prevent the skill from modifying its own code, SKILL.md, or configuration files. Treat skill files as read-only at runtime.
  • high Rogue Agent · line 304
    Skill modifies its own code, configuration, or behavior at runtime. Self-modification enables an agent to escalate privileges, disable safety constraints, or install persistent backdoors.
    Fix: Prevent the skill from modifying its own code, SKILL.md, or configuration files. Treat skill files as read-only at runtime.
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 $0.00034 $0.02719
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.01359
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00544
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00272

Measured 10d ago against content hash d3492774ed5b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

generate-agent-skills 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 10d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 2 executable files (scripts/scaffold_skill.py, scripts/validate_skill.py), 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.

.github/skills/generate-agent-skills/SKILL.md · 357 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 357 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Agent Skill Architect Workflow

This skill guides you through creating high-quality Agent Skills following a proven 6-step process.


🚨 CRITICAL WORKFLOW REQUIREMENTS 🚨

Before you begin, understand these NON-NEGOTIABLE rules:

  1. You MUST run scripts/scaffold_skill.py in Step 3.
    Manual file creation is PROHIBITED. The scaffolding script ensures consistency.

  2. You MUST use the generated templates.
    After scaffolding, templates exist in references/. Use them as your foundation.

  3. You MUST run scripts/validate_skill.py in Step 5.
    Validation catches errors before they propagate.

  4. You MUST follow all 6 steps in order.
    Skipping steps leads to non-compliant or broken skills.

If you bypass scaffolding scripts, you have FAILED this workflow.


Step 1: Understanding the Skill

Before scaffolding, clearly understand how the skill will be used through concrete examples.

For New Skills:

Ask the user clarifying questions to understand:

  • What functionality should the skill support?
  • What are example queries that should trigger this skill?
  • What outputs or actions should result?
  • Are there existing workflows or tools to integrate?

Example questions:

  • "Can you give some examples of how this skill would be used?"
  • "What would a user say that should trigger this skill?"
  • "What existing scripts or documentation should be included?"

For Existing Skills:

If working with an existing skill, analyze:

  • Current SKILL.md structure and content
  • Existing scripts, references, and assets
  • What's working well vs. what needs improvement

Conclude this step when: You have a clear sense of the skill's functionality and triggering scenarios.


Step 2: Planning Reusable Contents

Analyze the concrete examples from Step 1 to identify what reusable resources would help.

⚠️ Critical Decision: Script vs. Checklist

Before planning scripts, ask: "Is this task primarily analysis or computation?"

Read the full file on GitHub · 357 lines

Files

What ships with it

7 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. 10d ago First seen · 357 lines · 34 tokens per session scan A d3492774ed5b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

generate-agent-skills is a skill published in the GitHub repository canonical/copilot-collections (29 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 34 tokens to every session and 2,719 once invoked, about $0.0002 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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