PentestGPT is an AI-driven framework for penetration testing and capture-the-flag challenges. It guides staged workflows such as reconnaissance, asset discovery, vulnerability identification, exploitation, and reporting, using large language models to operate tools and reason about findings. The catalogue includes skills and instructions for using it.
Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to GreyDGL/PentestGPT. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/GreyDGL/PentestGPT/main/.agents/skills/writing-great-skills/SKILL.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/GreyDGL/PentestGPTWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/greydgl/pentestgpt/writing-great-skills)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/greydgl/pentestgpt/writing-great-skills"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/greydgl/pentestgpt/writing-great-skills/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/greydgl/pentestgpt/writing-great-skills"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/greydgl/pentestgpt/writing-great-skills.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00024 | $0.02002 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00012 | $0.01001 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00005 | $0.00400 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00002 | $0.00200 |
Grade A, and why
writing-great-skills 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 12d 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.
Copies of this mod
8 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:
- writing-great-skills — 100% identical, 2 lines differ
- writing-great-skills — 100% identical, 3 lines differ
- writing-great-skills — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
- writing-great-skills — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
- writing-great-skills — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
- writing-great-skills — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
- writing-great-skills — 100% identical, 1 lines differ
- writing-great-skills — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 83 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
A skill exists to wrangle determinism out of a stochastic system. Predictability — the agent taking the same process every run, not producing the same output — is the root virtue; every lever below serves it.
Bold terms are defined in GLOSSARY.md; look them up there for the full meaning.
Invocation
Two choices, trading different costs:
- A model-invoked skill keeps a description, so the agent can fire it autonomously and other skills can reach it (you can still type its name too). It contributes to context load — the description sits in the window every turn. Mechanics: omit
disable-model-invocation, and write a model-facing description with rich trigger phrasing ("Use when the user wants…, mentions…"). - A user-invoked skill strips the description from the agent's reach: only you, typing its name, can invoke it — and no other skill can. Zero context load, but it spends cognitive load: you are the index that must remember it exists. Mechanics: set
disable-model-invocation: true; thedescriptionbecomes human-facing — a one-line summary, trigger lists stripped.
Pick model-invocation only when the agent must reach the skill on its own, or another skill must. If it only ever fires by hand, make it user-invoked and pay no context load.
When user-invoked skills multiply past what you can remember, that piled-up cognitive load is cured by a router skill: one user-invoked skill that names the others and when to reach for each.
Writing the description
A model-invoked description does two jobs — state what the skill is, and list the branches that should trigger it. Every word increases context load, so a description earns even harder pruning than the body:
- Front-load the skill's leading word — the description is where it does its invocation work.
- One trigger per branch. Synonyms that rename a single branch are duplication — "build features using TDD … asks for test-first development" is one branch written twice. Collapse them; keep only genuinely distinct branches.
- Cut identity that's already in the body. Keep the description to triggers, plus any "when another skill needs…" reach clause.
What ships with it
1 file 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.
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.
- 12d ago First seen · 83 lines · 24 tokens per session scan A 7c6ba7ec25bb
writing-great-skills is a skill published in the GitHub repository GreyDGL/PentestGPT (15,433 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 24 tokens to every session and 2,002 once invoked, about $0.0001 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.
Other skills, from other repositories
ml-engineering
Field-tested methodology and concrete recipes for training and operating large-scale LLM/VLM/multi-modal models end to end - choosing and benchmarking accelerators, storage and network; SLURM/Kubernetes orchestration; maximizing training throughput and fitting models in memory; diagnosing and surviving training…
vercel-react-best-practices
React and Next.js performance optimization guidelines from Vercel Engineering. This skill should be used when writing, reviewing, or refactoring React/Next.js code to ensure optimal performance patterns. Triggers on tasks involving React components, Next.js pages, data fetching, bundle optimization, or performance…
vercel-composition-patterns
React composition patterns that scale. Use when refactoring components with boolean prop proliferation, building flexible component libraries, or designing reusable APIs. Triggers on tasks involving compound components, render props, context providers, or component architecture. Includes React 19 API changes.
paper-daily
Discover daily arXiv papers for LLM/Agent topics, rank candidates with keyword and institution filters, and prepare a small selected paper list for llm-paper-daily style workflows.
paper-subscribe
Subscribe to the centrally generated paper-daily feed, prepare a local digest, and deliver it on a schedule.
skill-adaptor
Run SkillAdaptor to evolve agent skills from task failures. Use when improving SKILL.md files from trajectories or after benchmark runs.