writing-great-skills

Guidance for designing reusable instructions called skills for AI coding agents.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when writing, reviewing, or changing a skill's description, invocation rules, or instructions.
Why use it?
It explains how to make an agent follow a predictable process and when a skill should be invoked automatically or only by the user.

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/modelstudioai/openagentpack/writing-great-skills
Any agent
npx skills add modelstudioai/OpenAgentPack --skill writing-great-skills
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/modelstudioai/OpenAgentPack

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 24 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,002 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 $0.00024 $0.02002
Opus 5 $0.00012 $0.01001
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00400
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00200

Measured 2d ago against content hash 7c6ba7ec25bb, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

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 2d 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.

Origin

This is a copy

100% identical to writing-great-skills — 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.

.agents/skills/writing-great-skills/SKILL.md · 83 lines

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; the description becomes 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.

Read the full file on GitHub · 83 lines

Files

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.

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. 2d ago First seen · 83 lines · 24 tokens per session scan A 7c6ba7ec25bb

Subscribe to this mod's changes

writing-great-skills is a skill published in the GitHub repository modelstudioai/OpenAgentPack (23 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. 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. It is 100% identical to writing-great-skills, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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