vellum-assistant: Skill for Cursor

.cursor/skills/vellum-skill-authoring/SKILL.md

vellum-skill-authoring is a skill for Cursor from vellum-ai/vellum-assistant. It costs 51 tokens per session (381 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of rules and review practices for creating and maintaining first-party Vellum skills in a code repository. A skill is an instruction and tool package that teaches the assistant how to handle a particular kind of work.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when editing skill instructions, manifests, tool definitions, bundled assistant skills, or tests for Vellum's own skills.
Why use it?
It helps keep skills portable, isolated, consistent, and safe to run in different environments. It also provides checks for tool contracts, scripts, error handling, and focused tests.

Skill for Cursor

Written for Cursor: installed under .cursor/. Also seen: mentions Cursor.

This is vellum-ai/vellum-assistant's own configuration. It tells Cursor how to work on vellum-assistant itself, so it is not a mod to install elsewhere. Copy it as a starting point and replace the rules that are about this project. Everything vellum-assistant configures →

About the project

Vellum Assistant is a personal AI assistant that remembers information about users, learns their preferences, and takes actions across connected apps. It is intended for people who want an assistant that can manage conversations, unfinished work, and proactive notifications over time. The catalogue skills, hooks, instruction, and setting configure or extend how the assistant works.

vellum-ai/vellum-assistant · 1,234 stars · on GitHub · vellum.ai

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to vellum-ai/vellum-assistant. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vellum-ai/vellum-assistant/main/.cursor/skills/vellum-skill-authoring/SKILL.md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/vellum-ai/vellum-assistant

Made for: Cursor.

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 vellum-skill-authoring

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vellum-ai/vellum-assistant/vellum-skill-authoring"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vellum-ai/vellum-assistant/vellum-skill-authoring.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 51 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 381 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 pass 7 Sept 2026
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 $0.00051 $0.00381
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.00191
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00076
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00038

Measured 13d ago against content hash 3c8e1f7f8d13, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

vellum-skill-authoring 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 13d 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.

.cursor/skills/vellum-skill-authoring/SKILL.md · 47 lines

What it actually says

Vellum Skill Authoring

Scope

Use this for Vellum runtime skills in skills/ and bundled assistant skills, not for Cursor Agent Skills under .cursor/skills/.

Core Constraints

  • First-party skills must be portable and isolated.
  • skills/ must not import from assistant/.
  • assistant/ must not import from skills/.
  • Prefer skill processes and supported contracts over new daemon tool registrations.
  • Avoid secrets, real personal data, and machine-specific paths in skill docs, tests, and fixtures.

SKILL.md Quality Bar

Skill instructions should be concise and operational:

  • State what the skill does and when to use it.
  • Prefer concrete steps over broad advice.
  • Keep user-facing terminology consistent.
  • Use generic examples only.
  • Avoid requiring hidden local state unless setup instructions create it.

Tool And Script Review

When a skill adds scripts or tools:

  1. Verify tool input/output contracts are explicit.
  2. Check error handling and user-facing messages.
  3. Confirm scripts can run in the skill process environment.
  4. Avoid direct imports across isolation boundaries.
  5. Add focused tests for parsing, contract handling, and failure cases.

Catalog And Packaging

When adding or renaming skills, check the relevant catalog, manifest, bundled registry, or packaging path used by the runtime. Do not assume a SKILL.md file alone makes the skill available to users.

Verification

Use focused tests around the changed skill, catalog entry, proxy bridge, or bundled registry. Add typecheck when contracts or generated manifests changed.

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. 13d ago First seen · 47 lines · 51 tokens per session scan A 3c8e1f7f8d13

Subscribe to this mod's changes

vellum-skill-authoring is a skill published in the GitHub repository vellum-ai/vellum-assistant (1,234 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 51 tokens to every session and 381 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 2026-08-30.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

lictor-security-check

Pre-release security audit for ANY project — AI-built or hand-written, web or mobile. Scans the codebase for the full range of real-world risks that get apps breached: leaked API & AI-provider keys, exposed configs/secrets, broken auth & access control (IDOR), injection (SQL/XSS/command), SSRF, open databases & cloud…

Raffa-jarrl/Lictor-AI · 135 tokens

lictor-rotate

Walks the user through rotating a leaked API key — step by step, provider-specific. Knows the exact URL to visit, the exact button to click, and how to verify the rotation worked. Supports Stripe, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Cloud / AI Studio, GitHub, AWS, Slack, Supabase, Firebase, Postmark, and generic OAuth providers.

Raffa-jarrl/Lictor-AI · 80 tokens

lictor-explain

Takes any security finding, error message, or jargon-heavy security advice and explains it in plain English. Use this when someone is confused by what /lictor-security-check found, or when they got a security warning from another tool and don't understand it.

Raffa-jarrl/Lictor-AI · 56 tokens

lictor-fix-it

Applies the fixes recommended by /lictor-security-check, with the user's explicit permission for each change. Walks through findings one at a time, shows the proposed change, gets approval, applies, runs tests if available, and moves on. Some fixes (rotating leaked credentials) require the user to act outside Claude …

Raffa-jarrl/Lictor-AI · 75 tokens

continual-learning

Nightly refinement of an existing per-repo review-style prompt using this reviewer's own finding outcomes. Read confirmed (resolved-by-commit / thumbs-up) and dismissed (thumbs-down) findings, promote the bug patterns the team actually fixes, demote the false-positive patterns, reconcile against the current prompt…

langchain-ai/open-swe · 89 tokens

ha-logs

A read-only troubleshooting skill for querying Hope Agent’s local SQLite databases, which store logs, conversations, and background-job status.

shiwenwen/hope-agent · 183 tokens