skill-creation-guide

A guide for creating reusable instructions that an AI coding agent can apply automatically to recurring tasks. It explains the SKILL.md file format and how to decide whether a skill is worth making.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to assess skill ideas, find opportunities in your work, and draft a correctly structured SKILL.md file.
Why use it?
It helps turn a repeated, clearly defined workflow into a consistent guide, while avoiding skills that are used too rarely or require too much individual judgment.

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/gleanwork/cursor-plugins/skill-creation-guide
Any agent
npx skills add gleanwork/cursor-plugins --skill skill-creation-guide
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/gleanwork/cursor-plugins

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 136 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,169 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 100% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00136 $0.01169
Opus 5 $0.00068 $0.00584
Sonnet 5 $0.00027 $0.00234
Haiku 4.5 $0.00014 $0.00117

Measured yesterday against content hash 5722a8039076, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

skill-creation-guide 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 yesterday.

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.

Origin

This is a copy

100% identical to skill-creation-guide — 0 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

glean/skills/skill-creation-guide/SKILL.md · 120 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 120 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Skill Creation Guide

Help the user author effective agent skills — single SKILL.md files (in the open Agent Skills format) that auto-trigger by context and provide specialized guidance. The format is shared across hosts (Claude Code, Cursor, and others); only the install location differs.

This skill covers three things: deciding whether a skill is worth creating, discovering candidates from the user's work, and generating a well-formed skill.

BE SKEPTICAL

Not every idea makes a good skill. Evaluate before creating:

Recurrence — Will this be used repeatedly?

  • ✅ Weekly or more → create
  • ⚠️ Monthly → reconsider, may not be worth it
  • ❌ One-time → skip

Automation — Can it actually be automated?

  • ✅ Clear, repeatable process → create
  • ⚠️ Needs significant judgment each time → reconsider
  • ❌ Too context-dependent, each case unique → skip

Value — Is the cumulative time saved significant?

  • ✅ Meaningful savings per use → create
  • ❌ Slower to invoke than doing manually → skip

Duplication — Does it already exist?

  • ✅ Novel, unaddressed need → create
  • ⚠️ Similar to an existing skill → enhance that instead
  • ❌ Already covered → skip

Don't create skills for one-time events, tasks that differ fundamentally each time, sub-30-second manual tasks, or things the user will forget exist.

Workflow A — Discover opportunities

When the user asks what they should automate, analyze their work patterns first.

Requires the Glean MCP tools. If they aren't visible, ask the user to set up Glean by prompting the harness (for example, Set up Glean for me).

  1. Gather context with Glean: memory (roles, responsibilities, active projects), user_activity (past ~2 weeks), and search for process docs ("runbook OR checklist OR process owner:me").
  2. Spawn the work-pattern-analyzer agent to identify repeated queries, frequent contexts, workflow sequences, and manual processes — and to vet each candidate against the recurrence/value tests above.
  3. Present vetted recommendations grouped by cumulative value, and show the rejected candidates with reasons. A few high-quality candidates beat many weak ones — "no automatable patterns" is a valid outcome.

Read the full file on GitHub · 120 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. yesterday First seen · 120 lines · 136 tokens per session scan A 5722a8039076

Subscribe to this mod's changes

skill-creation-guide is a skill published in the GitHub repository gleanwork/cursor-plugins (3 stars, last pushed 12d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 136 tokens to every session and 1,169 once invoked, about $0.0007 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to skill-creation-guide, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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