skill-authoring

skill-authoring is a skill for Claude Code from nyldn/claude-octopus. It costs 30 tokens per session (1,694 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

Guidance for writing or reviewing skills that make an agent follow a consistent process. A skill is a reusable set of instructions for handling a particular kind of task.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when creating, editing, reviewing, or deciding whether instructions should be a skill, command, or project guidance.
Why use it?
It helps reduce unpredictable behavior, missed triggers, and different results when the same skill is run repeatedly.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: disable-model-invocation in frontmatter. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions Claude Code.

Runs only inside its plugin — its command needs a path that Claude Code sets for a plugin’s own hooks and for nothing else. Install the plugin, not this.

Part of the octo plugin — 70 skills, 106 commands, 10 agents, 18 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it when creating, editing, reviewing, or deciding whether instructions should be a skill, command, or project guidance.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
About the project

Claude Octopus is an orchestration project that sends research, design, and coding tasks to Claude Code and other AI model providers so their results can be compared. Developers use it for multi-model work, disagreement detection, reviews, persistent context, and an optional workflow that moves from discovery through delivery. The catalogue entries are its commands, skills, agents, instructions, hooks, plugins, and settings.

nyldn/claude-octopus · 4,056 stars · on GitHub · reddit.com

Install

Getting it into your agent

This one installs as part of its plugin. Adding the marketplace and installing the plugin brings it with everything else the plugin ships.

Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add nyldn/claude-octopus
Claude Code
/plugin install octo

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install octo, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 70 skills, 106 commands, 10 agents, 18 hooks.

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 skill-authoring

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nyldn/claude-octopus/skill-authoring/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/nyldn/claude-octopus/skill-authoring)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nyldn/claude-octopus/skill-authoring"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nyldn/claude-octopus/skill-authoring/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 skill-authoring

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nyldn/claude-octopus/skill-authoring"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nyldn/claude-octopus/skill-authoring.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 30 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,694 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 $0.00030 $0.01694
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.00847
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00339
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00169

Measured yesterday against content hash 664244f50ed5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

skill-authoring 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.

.claude/skills/skill-authoring/SKILL.md · 166 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 166 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Skill Authoring

Load skills/blocks/engineering-method-selection.md from the installed plugin and apply only the methods relevant to this task. Preserve this entry point's execution contract and output format. Read referenced skills as instructions; do not invoke the current command recursively or add provider calls from a seat.

Domain language

Load skills/blocks/domain-modeling.md when a skill discusses providers, models, access, billing, reviewers, or votes. Reuse the shared definitions instead of inventing local synonyms. State the source and time of observations. Never infer authentication, entitlement, billing mode, quota, or model-family independence from a binary or transport name alone.

A skill exists to get determinism out of a stochastic system. Predictability is the goal, and it means the agent takes the same process every run — not that it produces the same output. Every rule below serves that.

docs/PLUGIN-ASSEMBLY-STANDARD.md already fixes the structure a skill body should take. This is about what makes the content inside that structure work.

Adapted from writing-great-skills in mattpocock/skills (MIT), with the invocation section rewritten for how this plugin actually loads skills.

When To Use

  • Writing a new skill, or reviewing one in a PR.
  • A skill fires when it should not, or fails to fire when it should.
  • A skill behaves differently run to run on the same input.
  • Deciding whether something should be a skill at all, or a command, or prose in CLAUDE.md.

When Not To Use

  • For the mechanical checklist — file layout, registration, required sections. That is docs/PLUGIN-ASSEMBLY-STANDARD.md and the CI suites.
  • For writing prompts that are not skills. That is skill-meta-prompt.

Inputs

The skill under construction or review, and an honest answer to: what should the agent do differently because this exists?

Workflow

Invocation: explicit by default

Every shipped command and skill carries disable-model-invocation: true. Claude Code therefore keeps Octopus out of model context until the user chooses an /octo:* command. This is a hard platform gate, not a prose reminder.

Read the full file on GitHub · 166 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 Changed · +13 lines 664244f50ed5
  2. 9d ago First seen · 153 lines · 30 tokens per session scan A 0fcbd89bf48e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

skill-authoring is a skill published in the GitHub repository nyldn/claude-octopus (4,056 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 30 tokens to every session and 1,694 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 2026-08-30.

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