create-skill

A guide for creating a new Cursor agent skill, which is a reusable set of instructions for handling a specific kind of task.

In plain words
What is it for?
Authoring a new skill, choosing between workflow, technique, pattern, and reference formats, and following naming and storage conventions.
Why use it?
It helps define a skill’s purpose, triggers, structure, inputs, outputs, and testing needs before writing it.

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/paultyng/skill-issue/create-skill
Any agent
npx skills add paultyng/skill-issue --skill create-skill
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/paultyng/skill-issue

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 36 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,154 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. 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 $0.00036 $0.02154
Opus 5 $0.00018 $0.01077
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00431
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00215

Measured 2d ago against content hash bfc20ec4b7b0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

create-skill 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.

skills/create-skill/SKILL.md · 224 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 224 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Create Skill

Skill Types

Categorize before writing -- this determines structure, degrees of freedom, and testing approach:

  • Technique: concrete method with steps (e.g. condition-based-waiting)
  • Pattern: mental model / way of thinking (e.g. flatten-with-flags)
  • Reference: API docs, syntax guides, tool documentation
  • Workflow: multi-step process with decision points (e.g. ship-it)

Requirements Gathering

Infer from conversation context when possible. If clarification is needed, use AskQuestion (or ask conversationally if unavailable). Capture:

  1. Purpose and scope: what specific task or workflow
  2. Storage location: personal (~/.cursor/skills/) or project (.cursor/skills/)
  3. Trigger scenarios: when should the agent apply this skill
  4. Domain knowledge: what the agent wouldn't already know
  5. Output format: templates, styles, or conventions required
  6. Existing patterns: examples or conventions to follow

Design

Name

  • Lowercase letters, numbers, hyphens only. Max 64 chars
  • Prefer verb-first or gerund form: create-skill > skill-creation, analyze-sessions > session-analysis
  • Name by what you DO or core insight, not generic labels
  • Avoid: helper, utils, tools, misc

Description (CSO-Critical)

The description determines whether the agent loads this skill. Max 1024 chars, third person.

Start with "Use when..." -- describe ONLY triggering conditions (symptoms, situations, contexts).

NEVER summarize the skill's workflow or process. Testing shows agents follow descriptions as shortcuts, skipping the full skill body. A description saying "does X then Y" causes agents to do exactly X then Y without reading the actual detailed instructions.

Include concrete triggers: error messages, symptoms, tool names, synonyms.

# BAD: workflow summary -- agent will shortcut to this
description: Analyzes code diffs, generates commit messages, and pushes to remote.

# BAD: too vague
description: Helps with documents.

# GOOD: triggering conditions only
description: Use when reviewing pull requests, examining code changes, or when asked for a code review.

# GOOD: specific triggers with keywords
description: Use when tests have race conditions, timing dependencies, or pass/fail inconsistently.

Read the full file on GitHub · 224 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 · 224 lines · 36 tokens per session scan A bfc20ec4b7b0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

create-skill is a skill published in the GitHub repository paultyng/skill-issue (9 stars, last pushed 22d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 36 tokens to every session and 2,154 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 2026-08-31.

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