skill-creator

skill-creator is a skill for Codex from PracticalSwan/agent-skills. It costs 50 tokens per session (5,413 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for creating or updating portable skills that extend coding agents with specialized knowledge, workflows, or tool connections.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to design, document, and update skills for Codex, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or a shared catalogue.
Why use it?
It helps keep a skill focused, reusable, and compatible with the coding agent or platform where it will run.

Skill for Codex

Written for Codex: agents/openai.yaml present. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions subagents; mentions Claude Code.

Good fit Use it to design, document, and update skills for Codex, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or a shared catalogue.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/practicalswan/agent-skills/skill-creator
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 PracticalSwan/agent-skills --skill skill-creator
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/PracticalSwan/agent-skills

Made for: Codex.

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-creator

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/practicalswan/agent-skills/skill-creator"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/practicalswan/agent-skills/skill-creator.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 50 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 5,413 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 warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 4 findings, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high Rogue Agent · line 249
    Skill modifies its own code, configuration, or behavior at runtime. Self-modification enables an agent to escalate privileges, disable safety constraints, or install persistent backdoors.
    Fix: Prevent the skill from modifying its own code, SKILL.md, or configuration files. Treat skill files as read-only at runtime.
  • high Rogue Agent · line 370
    Skill modifies its own code, configuration, or behavior at runtime. Self-modification enables an agent to escalate privileges, disable safety constraints, or install persistent backdoors.
    Fix: Prevent the skill from modifying its own code, SKILL.md, or configuration files. Treat skill files as read-only at runtime.
  • high Prompt Injection · line 446
    Hidden instructions were detected in comments or invisible text. These could contain malicious directives. Manual review is recommended.
    Fix: Audit all comments and invisible characters. Remove any instructions that direct the agent to perform unauthorized actions. Use plain, reviewable content.
  • medium Rogue Agent · line 28
    Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.
    Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
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 $0.00050 $0.05413
Opus 5 $0.00025 $0.02707
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.01083
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00541

Measured 4d ago against content hash 272868a4d8fc, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, 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 4d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 3 executable files (scripts/generate_openai_yaml.py, scripts/init_skill.py, scripts/quick_validate.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.

skill-creator/SKILL.md · 493 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 493 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Skill Creator

This skill provides guidance for creating effective skills.

Select the target host first

Before initializing or updating a skill, identify its intended discovery surface:

  • Codex: default to $CODEX_HOME/skills or ~/.codex/skills. The bundled agents/openai.yaml metadata and Codex helper scripts apply.
  • Claude Code: default to ~/.claude/skills when the user wants a personal Claude skill. A GLM Coding Plan endpoint changes the model provider, not Claude Code's skill directory. Do not require Codex UI metadata or Codex CLI commands unless the skill is also targeting Codex.
  • GitHub Copilot or shared catalog: use the host-visible or repository path named by the user and follow that host's current discovery rules.

For a portable skill, keep the core SKILL.md, scripts, references, and safety rules host-neutral. Put host-only commands in a clearly labeled routing section and include a practical fallback. Never overwrite a host-managed system skill while creating a portable catalog copy.

About Skills

Skills are modular, self-contained folders that extend Codex's capabilities by providing specialized knowledge, workflows, and tools. Think of them as "onboarding guides" for specific domains or tasks—they transform Codex from a general-purpose agent into a specialized agent equipped with procedural knowledge that no model can fully possess.

What Skills Provide

  1. Specialized workflows - Multi-step procedures for specific domains
  2. Tool integrations - Instructions for working with specific file formats or APIs
  3. Domain expertise - Company-specific knowledge, schemas, business logic
  4. Bundled resources - Scripts, references, and assets for complex and repetitive tasks

Core Principles

Concise is Key

The context window is a public good. Skills share the context window with everything else Codex needs: system prompt, conversation history, other Skills' metadata, and the actual user request.

Default assumption: Codex is already very smart. Only add context Codex doesn't already have. Challenge each piece of information: "Does Codex really need this explanation?" and "Does this paragraph justify its token cost?"

Read the full file on GitHub · 493 lines

Files

What ships with it

9 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. 4d ago Changed 272868a4d8fc
  2. 6d ago Changed 46b42cff777a
  3. 9d ago First seen · 493 lines · 50 tokens per session scan A 7fb58eacecd8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

skill-creator is a skill published in the GitHub repository PracticalSwan/agent-skills (14 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 50 tokens to every session and 5,413 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-09-03.