ai-agent-skills: Skill for Claude Code

.claude/skills/skill-best-practices/SKILL.md

skill-best-practices is a skill for Claude Code from dboeckli/ai-agent-skills. It costs 114 tokens per session (3,280 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for creating and maintaining Claude skills, which are instruction packages that change how an AI assistant handles particular tasks.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to plan a skill, write its SKILL.md file and metadata, define trigger conditions, review an existing skill, or troubleshoot skill behavior.
Why use it?
It helps avoid skills that load at the wrong time or whose instructions are ignored. It also gives a consistent structure for sharing them.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: installed under .claude/. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions Claude Code.

This is dboeckli/ai-agent-skills's own configuration. It tells Claude Code how to work on ai-agent-skills itself, so it is not a mod to install elsewhere. Copy it as a starting point and replace the rules that are about this project. Everything ai-agent-skills configures →

Part of the ai-agent-skills plugin — 4 skills, 1 hook shipped together

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to dboeckli/ai-agent-skills. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dboeckli/ai-agent-skills/master/.claude/skills/skill-best-practices/SKILL.md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/dboeckli/ai-agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install ai-agent-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 4 skills, 1 hook.

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-best-practices

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/dboeckli/ai-agent-skills/skill-best-practices/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/dboeckli/ai-agent-skills/skill-best-practices)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/dboeckli/ai-agent-skills/skill-best-practices"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/dboeckli/ai-agent-skills/skill-best-practices/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-best-practices

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/dboeckli/ai-agent-skills/skill-best-practices"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/dboeckli/ai-agent-skills/skill-best-practices.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 114 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,280 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
  • Socket pass 28 Jul 2026
  • Snyk pass 28 Jul 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 $0.00114 $0.03280
Opus 5 $0.00057 $0.01640
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00656
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00328

Measured 10d ago against content hash a724766d42f2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

skill-best-practices 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 1 executable file (scripts/validate-skills.sh), 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-best-practices/SKILL.md · 457 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 457 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.


Skill Best Practices

Reference: https://resources.anthropic.com/hubfs/The-Complete-Guide-to-Building-Skill-for-Claude.pdf

Instructions

Step 1: Identify your use case category

Determine which type of skill you're building:

  • Document & Asset Creation — consistent output (docs, designs, code)
  • Workflow Automation — multi-step processes with consistent methodology
  • MCP Enhancement — workflow guidance on top of MCP tool access

Define 2–3 concrete use cases before writing anything (see Planning section below).

Step 2: Create the folder and SKILL.md

  • Name the folder in kebab-case (e.g. my-skill-name)
  • Create exactly SKILL.md (case-sensitive) inside it
  • Write YAML frontmatter with name and description (see Technical requirements)

Step 3: Write the description — this is the most critical part

The description controls when Claude loads your skill. It must include:

  • WHAT the skill does
  • WHEN to use it (specific trigger phrases)
  • Optional: negative triggers ("Do NOT use for...")

See "Writing effective descriptions" for good/bad examples.

Step 4: Write the body instructions

Follow the recommended template: ## Instructions → numbered steps → ## Examples## Troubleshooting. Be specific and actionable. Move detailed docs to references/ and link to them.

Step 5: Update CLAUDE.md and README.md

After creating or modifying any skill in this repository, always update the skill tables in both files:

  • CLAUDE.md — skill table under "Included Skills" (Trigger column: one-line description of when it fires)
  • README.md — skill table under "Enthaltene Skills" (Beschreibung column: German one-liner)

Both files must stay in sync. This step is mandatory and must not be skipped.

Also invoke the cc-best-practices skill when working on skills in this repository to ensure context and session management follow project standards.

Step 6: Validate YAML and skills CLI compatibility

Run the validation script from the repository root before testing or committing:

Read the full file on GitHub · 457 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 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 · 457 lines · 114 tokens per session scan A a724766d42f2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

skill-best-practices is a skill published in the GitHub repository dboeckli/ai-agent-skills (0 stars, last pushed 16d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 114 tokens to every session and 3,280 once invoked, about $0.0006 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 2026-08-31.

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