claude-skill-authoring

claude-skill-authoring is a skill for Claude Code from dryvist/claude-code-plugins. It costs 54 tokens per session (1,246 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A guide for creating and editing skills, agents, and instruction files such as CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when authoring a new skill, changing agent rules, or deciding where project instructions and workflows belong.
Why use it?
It helps keep agent instructions in the right place, within sensible context limits, and structured so they load when needed.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions subagents.

Part of the project-standards plugin — 4 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it when authoring a new skill, changing agent rules, or deciding where project instructions and workflows belong.

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

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install project-standards, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 4 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 claude-skill-authoring

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/dryvist/claude-code-plugins/claude-skill-authoring.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/dryvist/claude-code-plugins/claude-skill-authoring)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/dryvist/claude-code-plugins/claude-skill-authoring"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/dryvist/claude-code-plugins/claude-skill-authoring.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 54 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,246 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 $0.00054 $0.01246
Opus 5 $0.00027 $0.00623
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00249
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00125

Measured 3d ago against content hash b655c9ee2f3f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

claude-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 3d 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.

project-standards/skills/claude-skill-authoring/SKILL.md · 125 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 125 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

AgentsMD Authoring Standards

Commands are skills. A slash command and a skill are the same mechanism — a SKILL.md (or a legacy flat commands/*.md) that you or the model can invoke. Author everything new as a skill; flat commands/*.md still work but are legacy.

File Structure

agentsmd/                     # Single source of truth
├── AGENTS.md                 # Main entry point
├── rules/                    # Auto-load every session (via .claude/rules symlink)
├── skills/                   # On-demand (via .claude/skills symlink)
├── agents/                   # Task subagents (via .claude/agents symlink)
└── workflows/                # Development workflow docs

.copilot/, .claude/, .gemini/ # Vendor dirs — symlinks only, no duplicates

Token Budget

Everything is measured in tokens — the actual context cost — not lines or bytes. Count with the same tool the guard uses: atc -m sonnet. The budget depends on when the file loads into context:

Tier Files Loads Target Max
Always-on CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md, .claude/rules/*, plugin rules/* every session 500 1000
On-demand body skills/*/SKILL.md, agents/*.md, commands/*.md when invoked, then persists 1500 3500
Reference skills/*/references/*.md only when the body links to it single-topic

A skill description is always loaded (it drives skill selection): keep the combined description + when_to_use within the 1,536-char listing cap and lead with the use case.

Canonical catalogs and state machines (e.g. gh-cli-patterns, finalize-pr) may exceed the on-demand max — record an explicit waiver rather than splitting a procedure that must stay whole.

The two rules that override token count

  1. Self-contained execution. A skill must run correctly and safely when it loads alone. Before trimming or moving anything out, ask: "if only this skill loaded, would it still work?" If not, the content stays inline. Token count is a flag, never a reason to break this.
  2. Safety reminders stay inline — even when duplicated. A "see X" reference is absent when only the referencing skill loads, so keep invocation-local correctness/safety content inline in every skill that acts on it (destructive git ops, merge-readiness gates, "don't act on stale state", least-privilege rules in editing agents). Deduplicate reference material (command catalogs, queries, examples, tables) — never decision logic a caller needs before it knows to load the source.

Read the full file on GitHub · 125 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. 3d ago First seen · 125 lines · 54 tokens per session scan A b655c9ee2f3f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

claude-skill-authoring is a skill published in the GitHub repository dryvist/claude-code-plugins (3 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 54 tokens to every session and 1,246 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-09-04.