skill-development

skill-development is a skill for Claude Code from Galaxy-Dawn/claude-scholar. It costs 43 tokens per session (961 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for creating and repairing reusable coding-agent skills in a local environment. It focuses on clear triggers, concise instructions, valid supporting files, and consistent structure.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create skills, improve their trigger descriptions, reorganize their instructions, and check their local references.
Why use it?
It helps prevent skills from being difficult to activate, overly long, or dependent on files and commands that do not exist.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the claude-scholar plugin — 45 skills, 34 commands, 6 agents, 5 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it to create skills, improve their trigger descriptions, reorganize their instructions, and check their local references.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/galaxy-dawn/claude-scholar/skill-development
About the project

Claude Scholar is a semi-automated research assistant for academic research and software development, supporting literature review, coding, experiments, reporting, writing, and project knowledge management. Computer science and AI researchers use it across the research workflow with several coding-agent platforms; the catalogue contains its skills, commands, agents, hooks, plugin, and instruction.

Galaxy-Dawn/claude-scholar · 5,381 stars · on GitHub

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 Galaxy-Dawn/claude-scholar --skill skill-development
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Galaxy-Dawn/claude-scholar

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install claude-scholar, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 45 skills, 34 commands, 6 agents, 5 hooks.

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-development

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/galaxy-dawn/claude-scholar/skill-development/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/galaxy-dawn/claude-scholar/skill-development)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/galaxy-dawn/claude-scholar/skill-development"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/galaxy-dawn/claude-scholar/skill-development/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-development

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/galaxy-dawn/claude-scholar/skill-development"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/galaxy-dawn/claude-scholar/skill-development.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 43 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 961 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 pass 7 Sept 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 $0.00043 $0.00961
Opus 5 $0.00022 $0.00481
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00192
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00096

Measured 5d ago against content hash e26c63898c9e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

skill-development 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 5d 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.

skills/skill-development/SKILL.md · 133 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 133 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Skill Development

Use this skill to create or repair Claude skills in the current local environment, not in an abstract plugin template.

Goal

Produce a skill that is:

  • easy to trigger,
  • lean at the SKILL.md layer,
  • backed by real references/, examples/, and scripts/ files when they are mentioned,
  • free of dead local references.

Core rules

  • Keep one skill = one durable job.
  • Treat the frontmatter description as the main trigger surface.
  • Keep SKILL.md focused on workflow and boundaries.
  • Move detailed catalogs, templates, and long explanations into references/ or examples/.
  • Do not mention files that do not exist.
  • Do not inherit stale names, agents, or sibling skill references without verifying they exist locally.

Default workflow

1. Inspect the current environment first

Before writing anything:

  • inspect the target skill directory,
  • inspect neighboring skills that already solve a similar problem,
  • verify which agents, commands, and sibling skills actually exist,
  • identify stale references before adding new ones.

Use the local inventory as the authority. Do not write guidance against an imagined plugin layout.

2. Lock the skill contract

Define four things before editing:

  1. what the skill does,
  2. what triggers it,
  3. what it explicitly does not do,
  4. which bundled resources are actually needed.

If the skill only needs a short workflow, keep it short. Do not create references/, examples/, or scripts/ just because the directories are conventional.

3. Write or repair the frontmatter

The frontmatter should:

  • use the real skill identifier in name,
  • use a third-person trigger description,
  • include concrete phrases a user would naturally say,
  • stay short enough to scan quickly.

Prefer descriptions of this form:

---
name: skill-name
description: This skill should be used when the user asks to "...", "...", or needs help with ....
---

4. Keep the main file lean

A good SKILL.md should usually contain:

  • a short goal section,
  • role boundaries,
  • a default workflow,
  • safety or quality rules,
  • a short list of additional resources.

Read the full file on GitHub · 133 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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. 5d ago First seen · 133 lines · 43 tokens per session scan A e26c63898c9e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

skill-development is a skill published in the GitHub repository Galaxy-Dawn/claude-scholar (5,381 stars, last pushed 12d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 43 tokens to every session and 961 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 2026-09-03.