skill-authoring

A guide for creating and maintaining Claude Code skills, which are reusable instructions for an AI coding agent. It explains how to keep those instructions modular and reveal detailed material only when needed.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when writing, editing, splitting, restructuring, or reviewing skills, including their descriptions, main instructions, and reference files.
Why use it?
It helps prevent skills from becoming large, repetitive, slow-to-load instruction files with unclear activation rules.

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/fmflurry/settings-opencode/skill-authoring
Any agent
npx skills add fmflurry/settings-opencode --skill skill-authoring
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/fmflurry/settings-opencode

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 89 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,287 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan B 1 finding. 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 $0.00089 $0.01287
Opus 5 $0.00044 $0.00643
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00257
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00129

Measured 2d ago against content hash ebdfa86b97f2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade B, and why

skill-authoring scanned grade B with 1 finding 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.

Enumerates other installed skillsmediumAgent snooping

Other skills' SKILL.md files reveal prompts, capabilities and secrets that should be invisible to peers.

- Avoid overlapping triggers with existing skills (check `/ls .claude/skills/*/SKILL.md`).
.claude/skills/skill-authoring/SKILL.md · 96 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 96 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Skill Authoring & Maintenance

Skills encode specialized knowledge for Claude Code's / command system. This guide ensures they stay modular, maintainable, and fast to load.

Progressive Disclosure — 3 Levels

Level 1: Frontmatter description (always loaded)

  • Max 100 words. State WHEN to trigger, not how.
  • Include concrete trigger phrases ("When creating…", "Use when…", "Ask when…").
  • Avoid overlapping triggers with existing skills (check /ls .claude/skills/*/SKILL.md).
  • Bad: "Scaffolds .NET architecture patterns." Good: "Use when creating a new bounded context or refactoring toward DDD + CQRS."

Level 2: SKILL.md body (loaded on trigger)

  • Hard max 500 lines. Target < 350.
  • Include only info needed on every activation: overview, core concepts, mandatory rules, quick-start checklist.
  • Section structure: When to use, core concepts, required conventions, checklist.
  • Wiki-link to reference files for recipes, templates, detailed examples: [reference-name.md](reference-name.md) or [[reference-name]].

Level 3: Reference files (loaded on demand only)

  • Live in the skill's directory: skill-name/reference.md, skill-name/templates.md, etc.
  • Contain: recipes, SQL boilerplate, full code examples, edge cases, detailed checklists, FAQ.
  • Linked from body via [name](file.md) or [[wiki-link]].
  • One skill may link to another's reference file (shared doctrine, not duplicated).

Add vs Split Heuristic

Info Type Body Reference Another Skill
Core concept, rule on every use Yes
"Only if…" workflow, edge case Yes
Shared by several skills (DRY) Yes, link to it

Example: dotnet-cop and security-review both link to dotnet-clean-architecture/postgres-schema-per-context.md instead of copying the RLS doctrine.

Description Quality (Trigger Activation)

  • Concrete triggers: "When creating…", "Use when…", "Ask when…"
  • No overlaps: Skill A triggers on "new feature + tests", Skill B on "refactor + tests" → collision. Disambiguate ("ATDD outer loop" vs "TDD inner loop").
  • No content summaries in description. Bad: "Explains progressive disclosure, add-vs-split, and anti-patterns." Good: "Use when writing a skill or asking if a skill is too large."
  • Test: Would a user know when to invoke / based only on the description?

Read the full file on GitHub · 96 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 · 96 lines · 89 tokens per session scan B ebdfa86b97f2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

skill-authoring is a skill published in the GitHub repository fmflurry/settings-opencode (171 stars, last pushed 20d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 89 tokens to every session and 1,287 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it B with 1 finding (enumerates other installed skills). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.