skill-architect

skill-architect is a skill for Claude Code from curiositech/some_claude_skills. It costs 105 tokens per session (5,400 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A comprehensive guide to designing, creating, reviewing, and improving Claude Agent Skills—packages of instructions and resources that give an agent specialized knowledge.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to build skills, audit their quality, improve activation descriptions, add expert guidance, and package supporting tools or references.
Why use it?
It helps skills activate for the right requests, teach useful domain practices, and avoid common design problems.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: mentions subagents; mentions Claude Code.

Needs its repository: it runs a file that does not travel with it, so clone the repository first. The line is python scripts/validate_skill.py <path>.

Good fit Use it to build skills, audit their quality, improve activation descriptions, add expert guidance, and package supporting tools or references.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/curiositech/some_claude_skills
agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/curiositech/some_claude_skills/skill-architect

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 skill-architect

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/curiositech/some_claude_skills/skill-architect/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/curiositech/some_claude_skills/skill-architect)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/curiositech/some_claude_skills/skill-architect"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/curiositech/some_claude_skills/skill-architect/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-architect

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/curiositech/some_claude_skills/skill-architect"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/curiositech/some_claude_skills/skill-architect.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 105 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 5,400 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: 1 finding, 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 185
    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 $0.00105 $0.05400
Opus 5 $0.00053 $0.02700
Sonnet 5 $0.00021 $0.01080
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00540

Measured 8d ago against content hash 36d21954b1af, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

skill-architect 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.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/validate_mermaid.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.

.claude/skills/skill-architect/SKILL.md · 485 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 485 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Skill Architect: The Authoritative Meta-Skill

The unified authority for creating expert-level Agent Skills. Encodes the knowledge that separates a skill that merely exists from one that activates precisely, teaches efficiently, and makes users productive immediately.

Philosophy

Great skills are progressive disclosure machines. They encode real domain expertise (shibboleths), not surface instructions. They follow a three-layer architecture: lightweight metadata for discovery, lean SKILL.md for core process, and reference files for deep dives loaded only on demand.


When to Use This Skill

Use for:

  • Creating new skills from scratch or from existing expertise
  • Auditing/reviewing skills for quality, activation, and progressive disclosure
  • Improving activation rates and reducing false positives
  • Encoding domain expertise (shibboleths, anti-patterns, temporal knowledge)
  • Designing skills that subagents consume effectively
  • Building self-contained tools (scripts, MCPs, subagents)
  • Debugging why skills don't activate or activate incorrectly

NOT for:

  • General Claude Code features (slash commands, MCP server implementation)
  • Non-skill coding advice or code review
  • Debugging runtime errors (use domain-specific skills)
  • Template generation without real domain expertise to encode

Quick Wins (Immediate Improvements)

For existing skills, apply in priority order:

  1. Tighten description → Follow [What] [When] [Keywords]. NOT for [Exclusions] formula
  2. Check line count → SKILL.md must be <500 lines; move depth to /references
  3. Add NOT clause → Prevent false activation with explicit exclusions
  4. Add 1-2 anti-patterns → Use shibboleth template (Novice/Expert/Timeline)
  5. Remove dead files → Delete unreferenced scripts/references (no phantoms)
  6. Test activation → Write 5 queries that should trigger and 5 that shouldn't

Progressive Disclosure Architecture

Skills use three-layer loading. The runtime scans metadata at startup, loads SKILL.md on activation, and pulls reference files only when the agent decides it needs them.

Read the full file on GitHub · 485 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. 8d ago First seen · 485 lines · 105 tokens per session scan A 36d21954b1af

Subscribe to this mod's changes

skill-architect is a skill published in the GitHub repository curiositech/some_claude_skills (219 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 105 tokens to every session and 5,400 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 2026-09-03.

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