skill-creator (pointer)

A pointer skill for creating new custom skills from Anthropic's official skill-creator guidance. A skill is a reusable set of instructions for a recurring task.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when a team repeatedly performs the same task, keeps retyping the same checklist, or needs a house procedure that can be reused across sessions.
Why use it?
It removes the need to design every skill from scratch and helps ensure the skill has clear instructions, appropriate triggers, and the required supporting files and licensing information.

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 97 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 563 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 $0.00097 $0.00563
Opus 5 $0.00048 $0.00282
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00113
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00056

Measured 2d ago against content hash f49e04cb5482, 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 (pointer) 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/skill-creator/SKILL.md · 23 lines

What it actually says

Skill Creator — mint it properly, from the source

Anthropic maintains the canonical skill-creation skill at github.com/anthropics/skills — including the format spec, authoring guidance, and evaluation tooling. This factory points at it rather than shipping a copy: the source stays current; copies rot. (Licenses in that repo are per-skill; skill-creator itself is Apache-2.0 — if your team ever vendors it into this repo, its LICENSE.txt comes along and a row goes into ../../THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md in the same PR.)

When a skill should exist

The third time the team does the same kind of task and re-explains the same context, that's a skill asking to be born. Signals: a recurring chore with stable steps, a house style that must survive stateless sessions, a checklist someone keeps retyping.

How to mint one (the seat runs this; the human gates it)

  1. Fetch the source: read the skill-creator skill from github.com/anthropics/skills (a Code session can attach or fetch the repo; a chat seat can read it through its GitHub connector).
  2. Follow it — it covers the parts homemade skills usually get wrong: a description that actually triggers at the right moments (and only those), progressive disclosure so the skill doesn't flood context, concrete examples over abstractions, and testing the skill against real prompts before trusting it.
  3. House requirements for any skill minted here:
    • It lands in skills/<name>/ by PR, like every change (RULE 14).
    • Its description says explicitly which seat runs it and which room it's invoked in — this factory's humans should never have to guess where a skill lives (hard-learned).
    • If it's for a chat-family seat, the PR description reminds the human to upload it in Settings → Skills.
  4. Journal the mint — what gap the skill closes, so a future retro can check whether it worked.
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 · 23 lines · 97 tokens per session scan A f49e04cb5482

Subscribe to this mod's changes

skill-creator (pointer) is a skill published in the GitHub repository squidbay/factory (5 stars, last pushed 12d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 97 tokens to every session and 563 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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