skill-authoring

A guide for creating and reorganizing skills in the .ai/skills system. A skill is a short, repeatable playbook that tells a coding agent how to handle a particular task.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when adding a skill, substantially restructuring one, or reviewing whether a skill has the required sections, process, checklist, and common mistakes.
Why use it?
It keeps skills consistent, practical, and aligned with the project’s architecture and documentation.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/extra-org/extra/skill-authoring
Any agent
npx skills add extra-org/extra --skill skill-authoring
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/extra-org/extra

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 42 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,064 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00042 $0.01064
Opus 5 $0.00021 $0.00532
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00213
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00106

Measured 2d ago against content hash 1d9b86da68d3, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

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 2d 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.

.claude/skills/skill-authoring/SKILL.md · 127 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 127 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Skill: Skill Authoring

Purpose

Define how to create new skill files so the .ai/skills/ system stays consistent, operational, and trustworthy. A skill is a short, repeatable playbook — not an essay.

When to Use This Skill

  • Creating a new skill file in .ai/skills/.
  • Substantially restructuring an existing skill.
  • Reviewing a proposed skill for quality and consistency.

Files to Read First

  • AGENTS.md (skills system + architecture rules a skill must not contradict).
  • .ai/README.md (the index a new skill must be added to).
  • An existing high-quality skill as a model (e.g. .ai/skills/code-review.md).
  • Any docs//ADR the new skill will reference.

Core Principles

  • Operational, not academic. A skill tells an agent what to do, step by step. No long prose.
  • Task-oriented and repeatable. Focus on behavior an agent will repeat.
  • Consistent structure. Every skill uses the standard section set (below).
  • Must include when to use it, files to read first, rules, process, checklist, and common mistakes.
  • Never contradicts AGENTS.md, the docs, or ADRs. If it would, you need an ADR/doc change first, not a skill that diverges.
  • References, not duplicates. Link to the authoritative doc/ADR rather than copying its content (which will drift). This is also why skills live only in .ai/ — never copy them into tool-specific folders.
  • Short enough to be used. If it's too long to read before a task, trim it.
  • Includes validation commands (e.g. make check).

Process

  1. Confirm the gap. Ensure no existing skill already covers the area; prefer improving one over adding a near-duplicate.
  2. Copy the template below into .ai/skills/<name>.md.
  3. Fill every section with concrete, project-specific instructions (mention real layers, files, and commands — not generic advice).
  4. Cross-check against AGENTS.md/ADRs for contradictions.
  5. Add it to .ai/README.md index and, if it maps to a task type, to the AGENTS.md skills mapping.
  6. Validate formatting with make check (Markdown only → still run it).

Read the full file on GitHub · 127 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. 2d ago First seen · 127 lines · 42 tokens per session scan A 1d9b86da68d3

Subscribe to this mod's changes

skill-authoring is a skill published in the GitHub repository extra-org/extra (108 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 42 tokens to every session and 1,064 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.