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.
npx skills add tikalk/adlc-team-skills --skill writing-skillsgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tikalk/adlc-team-skillsWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tikalk/adlc-team-skills/writing-skills)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tikalk/adlc-team-skills/writing-skills"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tikalk/adlc-team-skills/writing-skills/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tikalk/adlc-team-skills/writing-skills"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tikalk/adlc-team-skills/writing-skills.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00022 | $0.01722 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00009 | $0.00689 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00004 | $0.00344 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00002 | $0.00172 |
Grade A, and why
writing-skills 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 18d 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 173 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Writing Skills
Overview
Writing skills IS Test-Driven Development applied to process documentation.
A skill is behavior-shaping code, not prose. You write a failing test (a pressure scenario an agent gets wrong without the skill), watch it fail, write the minimal skill that fixes it, watch it pass, then close loopholes.
Core principle: if you didn't watch an agent fail without the skill, you don't know whether the skill teaches the right thing — or anything at all.
The Iron Law:
NO SKILL WITHOUT A FAILING BASELINE FIRST
This applies to new skills AND to edits of existing skills. "Simple addition", "just a section", "docs update" — all the same violation. Write the skill before testing it? Delete it and start over.
When to Use
- Creating a new skill for this repo (also read CONTRIBUTING.md — new skills must be agreed in an issue first and ship with eval coverage)
- Editing any
skills/**/SKILL.mdcontent - Reviewing a PR that changes skill content
When NOT to use: for project-specific conventions (those go in the team-ai-directives repo as CDRs), or for mechanical constraints a script or test can enforce — automate those, save documentation for judgment calls.
Core Process
RED — Baseline the failure
Run the scenario WITHOUT the skill loaded. Document verbatim:
- What the agent actually did
- The exact rationalizations it used to skip the correct behavior
- Which pressures triggered the failure (time, sunk cost, authority, "it works either way")
If the agent already behaves correctly without the skill, stop — there is nothing to fix. A skill that enforces behavior that comes for free is context noise (this repo exists to fight context noise, not add to it).
GREEN — Write the minimal skill
Start from the template (templates/SKILL-template.md in this directory).
Address only the failures you observed in RED — not hypothetical ones.
Run the same scenario WITH the skill. The agent should now comply.
What ships with it
2 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.
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.
- 18d ago Changed 695615b97373
- 25d ago First seen · 173 lines · 22 tokens per session scan A 29a0bb266a26
writing-skills is a skill published in the GitHub repository tikalk/adlc-team-skills (141 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 22 tokens to every session and 1,722 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5.5. 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 2026-09-21.
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