skill-creator

A guide for creating, editing, reviewing, and organizing skills for coding agents.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create or improve a skill, move supporting material into scripts or references, and check a skill against its requirements.
Why use it?
It helps keep skill instructions focused, reusable, and correctly structured as they grow.

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 76 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,900 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 86% 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 $0.00076 $0.03900
Opus 5 $0.00038 $0.01950
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00780
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00390

Measured 2d ago against content hash 5afd017ef4d7, 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 5 executable files (scripts/init_skill.py, scripts/package_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.

Origin

This is a copy

86% identical to skill-creator — 58 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.

skills/skill-creator/SKILL.md · 373 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 373 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.

About Skills

Skills are modular, self-contained packages 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?"

Prefer concise examples over verbose explanations.

Set Appropriate Degrees of Freedom

Match the level of specificity to the task's fragility and variability:

High freedom (text-based instructions): Use when multiple approaches are valid, decisions depend on context, or heuristics guide the approach.

Medium freedom (pseudocode or scripts with parameters): Use when a preferred pattern exists, some variation is acceptable, or configuration affects behavior.

Low freedom (specific scripts, few parameters): Use when operations are fragile and error-prone, consistency is critical, or a specific sequence must be followed.

Think of Codex as exploring a path: a narrow bridge with cliffs needs specific guardrails (low freedom), while an open field allows many routes (high freedom).

Read the full file on GitHub · 373 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 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 · 373 lines · 76 tokens per session scan A 5afd017ef4d7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

skill-creator is a skill published in the GitHub repository understudy-ai/understudy (456 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 76 tokens to every session and 3,900 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 86% identical to skill-creator, differing in 58 lines, and is treated as a copy.