What is agent-skills?

A standard way to package reusable instructions and supporting files for AI agents. An agent skill is a folder containing a required SKILL.md file and may also include scripts, reference documents, or assets.

Use it to create, validate, package, publish, or maintain Agent Skills, including their metadata, naming, compatibility, and optional supporting files.

Without a shared format, reusable agent instructions are harder to discover, validate, package, and distribute across tools. This gives the skill metadata and structure that supported agents can understand.

agent-skills — Skill for Claude Code by Tyler-R-Kendrick

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 Tyler-R-Kendrick/agent-skills --skill agent-skills

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Tyler-R-Kendrick/agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install agent-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 57 skills.

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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tyler-r-kendrick/agent-skills/agent-skills/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tyler-r-kendrick/agent-skills/agent-skills)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tyler-r-kendrick/agent-skills/agent-skills"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tyler-r-kendrick/agent-skills/agent-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.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tyler-r-kendrick/agent-skills/agent-skills"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tyler-r-kendrick/agent-skills/agent-skills.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 85 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 930 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.

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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00085	$0.00930
Opus 5.5	$0.00034	$0.00372
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00017	$0.00186
Haiku 4.5	$0.00009	$0.00093

Measured 2mo ago against content hash 3e727822c3f8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

agent-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 2mo 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/ai/agent-skills/SKILL.md · 122 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 122 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Agent Skills

Overview

Agent Skills is an open standard from Anthropic for packaging reusable capabilities that AI agents can discover and load dynamically. A skill is a directory containing a SKILL.md file with YAML frontmatter metadata and Markdown instructions. Adopted by Claude, VS Code Copilot, OpenAI Codex, Cursor, and 25+ platforms.

Skill Structure

my-skill/
  SKILL.md          # Required — metadata + instructions
  scripts/          # Optional — executable scripts
  references/       # Optional — reference documents
  assets/           # Optional — supporting files

SKILL.md Format

---
name: my-skill
description: "Use when working with My Framework to follow best practices."
license: MIT
metadata:
  displayName: "My Skill"
  category: frameworks
  author: your-name
compatibility:
  - claude
  - copilot
allowed-tools:
  - Bash
  - Read
  - Edit
---

# My Skill

## Overview
Instructions for the agent when this skill is activated...

## Best Practices
- Concrete guidance the agent should follow
- Code examples demonstrating correct usage

Required Frontmatter

Field	Type	Rules
`name`	string	Must match directory name. Lowercase, hyphens, digits only. Max 64 chars.
`description`	string	What the skill does and when to trigger it.

Optional Frontmatter

Field	Type	Description
`license`	string	SPDX identifier (e.g., `MIT`, `Apache-2.0`)
`metadata`	object	Arbitrary key-value pairs (category, author, tags)
`compatibility`	list	Target platforms
`allowed-tools`	list	Tools the skill may use

Description Best Practices

The description field is critical for discovery — agents use it to decide when to activate the skill:

Start with a trigger phrase: "Use when working with X…"
Be specific: "Use when configuring ASP.NET Core middleware" not "Web development skill"
Keep it under 200 characters

Content Guidelines

Keep the main SKILL.md under 500 lines (~5000 tokens)
Use concrete code examples, not abstract descriptions
Include "do this, not that" guidance
Structure with clear headings for scanability

Read the full file on GitHub · 122 lines

Files

What ships with it

7 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.

2mo ago First seen · 122 lines · 85 tokens per session scan A 3e727822c3f8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

agent-skills is a skill published in the GitHub repository Tyler-R-Kendrick/agent-skills (13 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 85 tokens to every session and 930 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-08-31.

Building agents

agent-skills next to 6 skills from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
agent-skillsTyler-R-Kendrick/agent-skills	Skill	13	5mo ago	MIT	A	85	Claude Code
imagegenopenai/codex	Skill	133k	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	113	Codex
playwright-climicrosoft/playwright	Skill	99k	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	19	Claude Code
local-ai-agentsmicrosoft/ai-agents-for-beginners	Skill	79k	4d ago	MIT	A	200	Claude Code, Codex
systematic-debuggingobra/superpowers	Skill	313k	3d ago	MIT	A	21	Claude Code
next-cache-components-adoptionvercel/next.js	Skill	143k	yesterday	MIT	A	95	Claude Code
next-partial-prefetching-adoptionvercel/next.js	Skill	143k	yesterday	MIT	A	103	Claude Code