skill-creator

A workflow for creating and organizing professional skills for coding agents. It covers the skill's metadata, directory structure, instructions, supporting references, assets, and validation.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create or improve skill directories, write `SKILL.md` instructions, add scripts or references, and validate skill metadata.
Why use it?
It helps ensure a new agent skill is consistently structured and discoverable instead of becoming a loose collection of instructions.

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/plainlang/plain-forge/skill-creator
Any agent
npx skills add plainlang/plain-forge --skill skill-creator
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/plainlang/plain-forge

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 52 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 666 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 97% 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 $0.00052 $0.00666
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.00333
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00133
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00067

Measured 2d ago against content hash 4f4e1529d1eb, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

skill-creator 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.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/validate-metadata.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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

97% identical to skill-best-practices — 3 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/skill-creator/SKILL.md · 46 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 46 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Skill Authoring Procedure

Follow these steps to generate a skill that adheres to the agentskills.io specification and progressive disclosure principles.

Step 1: Initialize and Validate Metadata

  1. Define a unique name: 1-64 characters, lowercase, numbers, and single hyphens only.
  2. Draft a description: Max 1,024 characters, written in the third person, including negative triggers.
  3. Execute Validation Script: Run the validation script to ensure compliance before proceeding: python3 scripts/validate-metadata.py --name "[name]" --description "[description]"
  4. If the script returns an error, self-correct the metadata based on the stderr output and re-run until successful.

Step 2: Structure the Directory

  1. Create the root directory using the validated name.
  2. Initialize the following subdirectories:
    • scripts/: For tiny CLI tools and deterministic logic.
    • references/: For flat (one-level deep) context like schemas or API docs.
    • assets/: For output templates, JSON schemas, or static files.
  3. Ensure no human-centric files (README.md, INSTALLATION.md) are created.

Step 3: Draft Core Logic (SKILL.md)

  1. Use the template in assets/skill-template.md as the starting point.
  2. Write all instructions in the third-person imperative (e.g., "Extract the text," "Run the build").
  3. Enforce Progressive Disclosure:
    • Keep the main logic under 500 lines.
    • If a procedure requires a large schema or complex rule set, move it to references/.
    • Command the agent to read the specific file only when needed: "Read references/api-spec.md to identify the correct endpoint."

Step 4: Identify and Bundle Scripts

  1. Identify "fragile" tasks (regex, complex parsing, or repetitive boilerplate).
  2. Outline a single-purpose script for the scripts/ directory.
  3. Ensure the script uses standard output (stdout/stderr) to communicate success or failure to the agent.

Step 5: Final Logic Validation

  1. Review the SKILL.md for "hallucination gaps" (points where the agent is forced to guess).
  2. Verify all file paths are relative and use forward slashes (/).
  3. Cross-reference the final output against references/checklist.md.

Read the full file on GitHub · 46 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 files 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 · 46 lines · 52 tokens per session scan A 4f4e1529d1eb

Subscribe to this mod's changes

skill-creator is a skill published in the GitHub repository plainlang/plain-forge (55 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 52 tokens to every session and 666 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 97% identical to skill-best-practices, differing in 3 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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