skill-authoring

A guide for creating and editing reusable agent skills, including their required metadata, folder structure, scripts, references, and quality checks.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when authoring a new skill, revising its description or structure, bundling scripts, or checking whether the skill follows the Agent Skills specification.
Why use it?
It helps skill authors make files that agents can find and use reliably. It also keeps instructions concise and puts detailed material in the right supporting files.

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/oleg494/coding-kit/skill-authoring
Any agent
npx skills add oleg494/coding-kit --skill skill-authoring
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/oleg494/coding-kit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 93 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,247 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan B 1 finding. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00093 $0.01247
Opus 5 $0.00046 $0.00624
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00249
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00125

Measured 2d ago against content hash 2ae9015cebfc, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade B, and why

skill-authoring scanned grade B with 1 finding 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.

Enumerates other installed skillsmediumAgent snooping

Other skills' SKILL.md files reveal prompts, capabilities and secrets that should be invisible to peers.

4. **Choose the location.** Portable (any machine/project) → kit `skills/<slug>/`, commit — subject to the kit gates (English, file-size, review), propagates to every harness automatically. Machine/user-specific → the ha
skills/skill-authoring/SKILL.md · 96 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 96 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

How to author skills correctly

A set of rules based on the Agent Skills specification + practice. Verified against real skills.

1. Frontmatter (required fields)

---
name: my-skill
description: Use when [triggers/symptoms/contexts]. [what it does + when to apply]
---
Field Rule
name REQUIRED. 1–64 characters, a-z0-9 + hyphens. Must match the skill's folder name
description REQUIRED. 1–1024 characters. «What it does + when to use»; include the keywords the agent searches by. NOT a workflow summary
license optional
compatibility 1–500 characters, only if there are environment requirements

2. Directory structure

skill-name/
├── SKILL.md            # required
├── scripts/            # optional: executable scripts
├── references/         # optional: details, «read when X»
├── assets/             # optional
└── any other files/folders — allowed
  • From SKILL.md reference files with relative paths from the skill root.
  • Progressive disclosure: SKILL.md < ~500 lines; details go into references/ with a pointer «read this when X happens».

3. Script bundling (scripts/)

  1. First check for an existing tool: npx, uvx, pipx, bunx — take an existing one, write your own only when none exists.
  2. If you bundle a script, it must be self-contained: document dependencies in SKILL.md or compatibility.
  3. Agent-safe design:
    • NO interactive prompts — the agent will hang on a TTY. Input only via arguments.
    • --help with usage; clear error messages.
    • Structured output: result to stdout, diagnostics to stderr.
    • Idempotency; --dry-run for destructive operations.
    • Predictable output size (agents truncate ~10–30K characters).

4. Best practices and antipatterns

Do:

  • Small, composable, like a function: one coherent task.
  • Description in the imperative: «Use when …», list the triggers. Agents under-trigger.
  • Add what the agent does not know; drop what it already can do.
  • Gotchas sections — the most valuable content; checklists for multi-step processes; output templates.
  • Defaults, not menus; procedures, not declarations; explain «why».
  • Calibrate detail to fragility: for fragile operations — prescriptively.

Read the full file on GitHub · 96 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. 2d ago First seen · 96 lines · 93 tokens per session scan B 2ae9015cebfc

Subscribe to this mod's changes

skill-authoring is a skill published in the GitHub repository oleg494/coding-kit (1 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 93 tokens to every session and 1,247 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it B with 1 finding (enumerates other installed skills). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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