skill-authoring

skill-authoring is a skill for Claude Code from paulnsorensen/easy-cheese. It costs 74 tokens per session (1,799 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A writing guide for creating or revising skills used by coding agents. It defines templates, wording rules, trigger descriptions, and size limits for skill files.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when authoring a new skill, updating a SKILL.md file, adding discipline rules, or reviewing an existing skill.
Why use it?
It helps skills get selected for the right requests and keeps their instructions focused and within system limits.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: Claude Code plugin machinery. Also seen: mentions subagents; mentions Claude Code; installed under .agents/ (shared by several agents).

Part of the easy-cheese plugin — 18 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it when authoring a new skill, updating a SKILL.md file, adding discipline rules, or reviewing an existing skill.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/paulnsorensen/easy-cheese/skill-authoring
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 paulnsorensen/easy-cheese --skill skill-authoring
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/paulnsorensen/easy-cheese

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install easy-cheese, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 18 skills.

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/paulnsorensen/easy-cheese/skill-authoring/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/paulnsorensen/easy-cheese/skill-authoring)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/paulnsorensen/easy-cheese/skill-authoring"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/paulnsorensen/easy-cheese/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/paulnsorensen/easy-cheese/skill-authoring"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/paulnsorensen/easy-cheese/skill-authoring.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 74 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,799 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00074 $0.01799
Opus 5 $0.00037 $0.00899
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00360
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00180

Measured 10d ago against content hash 03cc6d3f47fb, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, 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 10d 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.

.agents/skills/skill-authoring/SKILL.md · 185 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 185 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Skill Authoring — easy-cheese conventions

This document codifies the skill-authoring rules for easy-cheese, drawn from obra/superpowers (CSO principle, Iron Law template, pressure-test gate) and Matt Pocock's skills repo (size budget, authoring checklist). It is the canonical reference for anyone adding or revising a skill.


Description rule (CSO)

The description is the only thing the harness shows the model when choosing a skill. Optimize it for triggering, not explanation.

The rule: sentence 1 = capability; sentence 2 = "Use when [triggering conditions]". No workflow summary, no pipeline-position prose, no feature list.

Rationale: a description that summarizes the skill's workflow creates a shortcut the model takes instead of reading the SKILL.md body. The skill then silently degrades to its own one-line description.

Constraints:

  • Maximum 1024 characters (Codex rejects longer descriptions).
  • Third-person, present tense.
  • Triggering conditions name concrete phrases the user might say.

Test: strip the description and ask: could a model choose this skill over all others based on these words alone? If not, the triggers are missing.


Size budget

Keep SKILL.md bodies lean. The goal is a body a model can read in one pass without losing the thread.

The budget: 3,600 estimated tokens for the SKILL.md body (frontmatter excluded). At this repo's measured prose density that's roughly 150 lines, but tokens are the gated unit, not lines — line count misleads on dense prose: all 16 skills in this repo pass Anthropic's 500-line rule, while 8 exceed our 3,600-token budget on the same bodies.

Enforcement: CI runs this as a shrink-only ratchet — .github/scripts/validate_skills.py, baselines recorded in .github/skill-budgets.json, regenerated via just update-skill-budgets. A skill already over budget when the ratchet was introduced is grandfathered at its recorded value and may only shrink from there; a skill at or under budget must stay under 3,600.

Read the full file on GitHub · 185 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. 10d ago First seen · 185 lines · 74 tokens per session scan A 03cc6d3f47fb

Subscribe to this mod's changes

skill-authoring is a skill published in the GitHub repository paulnsorensen/easy-cheese (18 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 74 tokens to every session and 1,799 once invoked, about $0.0004 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.