skill-creator

Skill Creator

This skill provides guidance for creating effective skills.

About Skills

Skills are modular, self-contained packages that extend Claude's capabilities by providing specialized knowledge, workflows, and tools. Think of them as "onboarding guides" for specific domains or tasks—they transform Claude from a general-purpose agent into a specialized agent equipped with procedural knowledge that no model can fully possess.

IMPORTANT:

• Skills are not documentation, they are practical instructions for Claude Code to use the tools, packages, plugins or APIs to achieve the tasks.
• Each skill teaches Claude how to perform a specific development task, not what a tool does.
• Claude Code can activate multiple skills automatically to achieve the user's request.

What Skills Provide

1. Specialized workflows - Multi-step procedures for specific domains
2. Tool integrations - Instructions for working with specific file formats or APIs
3. Domain expertise - Company-specific knowledge, schemas, business logic
4. Bundled resources - Scripts, references, and assets for complex and repetitive tasks

Anatomy of a Skill

Every skill consists of a required SKILL.md file and optional bundled resources:

.claude/skills/
└── skill-name/
    ├── SKILL.md (required)
    │   ├── YAML frontmatter metadata (required)
    │   │   ├── name: (required)
    │   │   ├── description: (required)
    │   │   ├── license: (optional)
    │   │   └── version: (optional)
    │   └── Markdown instructions (required)
    └── Bundled Resources (optional)
        ├── scripts/          - Executable code (Python/Bash/etc.)
        ├── references/       - Documentation intended to be loaded into context as needed
        └── assets/           - Files used in output (templates, icons, fonts, etc.)

Requirements (IMPORTANT)

• Skill should be combined into specific topics, for example: cloudflare, cloudflare-r2, cloudflare-workers, docker, gcloud should be combined into devops
• SKILL.md should be less than 150 lines and include the references of related markdown files and scripts.
• Each script or referenced markdown file should be also less than 150 lines, remember that you can always split them into multiple files (progressive disclosure principle).
• Descriptions in metadata of SKILL.md files should be both concise (less than 200 characters) and still contains enough usecases of the references and scripts, this will help skills can be activated automatically during the implementation process of Claude Code.
• Referenced markdowns:
  • Sacrifice grammar for the sake of concision when writing these files.
  • Can reference other markdown files or scripts as well.
• Referenced scripts:
  • Prefer nodejs or python scripts instead of bash script, because bash scripts are not well-supported on Windows.
  • If you're going to write python scripts, make sure you have requirements.txt
  • Make sure scripts respect .env file follow this order: process.env > $HOME/.claude/skills/${SKILL}/.env (global) > $HOME/.claude/skills/.env (global) > $HOME/.claude/.env (global) > ./.claude/skills/${SKILL}/.env (cwd) > ./.claude/skills/.env (cwd) > ./.claude/.env (cwd)
  • Create .env.example files to show the required environment variables.
  • Always write tests for these scripts.