writing-skills

writing-skills is a skill for Claude Code from isvlasov/rageatc-oss. It costs 38 tokens per session (1,776 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

Guidance for creating and updating Claude Code Agent Skills, which are instruction files that change how an AI coding agent handles specific tasks. It explains how to keep those instructions focused and organized.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when writing a new skill, revising its instructions or description, deciding where it should live, or adding supporting files.
Why use it?
It helps avoid skills that are too long, vague, repetitive, or triggered in the wrong situations.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: $ARGUMENTS substitution. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions subagents; mentions Claude Code.

Part of the rageatc-core-oss plugin — 24 skills, 6 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it when writing a new skill, revising its instructions or description, deciding where it should live, or adding supporting files.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/isvlasov/rageatc-oss/writing-skills
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 isvlasov/rageatc-oss --skill writing-skills
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/isvlasov/rageatc-oss

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install rageatc-core-oss, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 24 skills, 6 agents.

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 writing-skills

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/isvlasov/rageatc-oss/writing-skills/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/isvlasov/rageatc-oss/writing-skills)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/isvlasov/rageatc-oss/writing-skills"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/isvlasov/rageatc-oss/writing-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.

agentmods 80×15 button for writing-skills

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/isvlasov/rageatc-oss/writing-skills"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/isvlasov/rageatc-oss/writing-skills.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 38 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,776 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.
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 $0.00038 $0.01776
Opus 5 $0.00019 $0.00888
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00355
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00178

Measured 12d ago against content hash 85798372070b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

writing-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.

plugins/rageatc-core-oss/skills/writing-skills/SKILL.md · 101 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 101 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Writing Skills

The reader of every skill is an agent. A line earns its place only if it changes the agent's behaviour versus what it would do anyway — text the agent already knows, filler, and repetition are bloat. Apply that test to every line you write.

The same test scales up. Prefer the simplest thing that fixes an observed failure — often that is nothing at all: if the model already handles the task well, don't write the skill; if a line answers an imagined problem, don't write the line. Simple beats clever, and YAGNI applies to skills as much as to code.

If the skill's intent, triggers, or location (personal ~/.claude/skills/, project .claude/skills/, or a plugin's skills/) are unclear, ask before writing.

How skills load

Three tiers drive every design decision:

  1. Always in context: every installed skill's name and description (plus when_to_use if set), ~100 tokens each. The listing caps description + when_to_use at 1,536 chars combined; when the total listing budget overflows, least-used skills' descriptions are truncated first (/doctor shows this). At library scale, every description word is a recurring cost.
  2. On trigger: the SKILL.md body. Keep under ~500 lines / ~5,000 tokens.
  3. On demand: bundled files, loaded only when referenced. Free until read.

Workflow

Step 1 — Choose the invocation mode first

Decide before writing anything else; it shapes the description and the body:

  • Model-invoked (default): the agent discovers it by description match. Needs a rich trigger description.
  • User-invoked only (disable-model-invocation: true): for task skills with side effects (deploy, commit) or skills the user deliberately runs as /name. The description becomes a short human-facing summary — the user, not the matcher, is the audience.
  • Model-only (user-invocable: false): background knowledge; hidden from the / menu.

Step 2 — Name it

Lowercase letters, numbers, hyphens; ≤64 chars; must match the folder name; no "claude" or "anthropic" (reserved). Prefer gerund form (reviewing-code). Avoid generic terms (helper, utils, tools).

Read the full file on GitHub · 101 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. 12d ago First seen · 101 lines · 38 tokens per session scan A 85798372070b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

writing-skills is a skill published in the GitHub repository isvlasov/rageatc-oss (9 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 38 tokens to every session and 1,776 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 2026-08-31.