writing-skills

writing-skills is a skill for Claude Code from Vimalk0703/shipworthy. It costs 56 tokens per session (4,957 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for creating reusable instructions that shape how an AI coding agent behaves. It treats those instructions like software specifications that should be tested and improved.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps create new skills, apply test-driven development (writing tests before implementation) to documentation, improve how skills are found by AI systems, and investigate recurring failures.
Why use it?
Vague instructions can make an AI agent behave inconsistently. This guide helps authors define, test, and maintain reliable skills.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the shipworthy plugin — 66 skills, 7 commands, 3 hooks shipped together

Good fit It helps create new skills, apply test-driven development (writing tests before implementation) to documentation, improve how skills are found by AI systems, and investigate recurring failures.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/vimalk0703/shipworthy/writing-skills
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 Vimalk0703/shipworthy --skill writing-skills
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Vimalk0703/shipworthy

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install shipworthy, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 66 skills, 7 commands, 3 hooks.

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 writing-skills

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vimalk0703/shipworthy/writing-skills/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/vimalk0703/shipworthy/writing-skills)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vimalk0703/shipworthy/writing-skills"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vimalk0703/shipworthy/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for writing-skills

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vimalk0703/shipworthy/writing-skills"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vimalk0703/shipworthy/writing-skills.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 56 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,957 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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00056 $0.04957
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.02478
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00991
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00496

Measured 10d ago against content hash 23f37d2d0097, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

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 10d 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/meta/writing-skills/SKILL.md · 369 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 369 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Writing Skills

This is the meta-skill: the skill for writing skills. It treats skill authorship with the same rigor as software engineering — because skills ARE production code. They run on every session, shape every output, and compound in effect over time. A sloppy skill causes more damage than a sloppy function because it corrupts behavior across every future interaction.

1. Skills Are Tests for Behavior

Just like code tests verify that software behaves correctly, skills verify that the AI follows correct processes. A test asserts "given input X, the output must be Y." A skill asserts "given situation X, the AI must behave like Y."

This is not a metaphor. Skills are literally executable specifications for AI behavior. They are loaded into context, parsed for rules, and enforced during generation. If a skill is vague, the AI will interpret it loosely — the same way a developer interprets a vague test as "anything goes." If a skill is specific, the AI will follow it precisely — the same way a developer follows a well-written test that leaves no room for misinterpretation.

The consequences of treating skills casually are severe:

  • Untested behavior drifts. Without a skill, the AI will handle the same situation differently across sessions. One session it adds error handling; the next it does not. One session it writes tests first; the next it writes code first and "plans to add tests later."
  • Rationalizations fill the vacuum. When there is no explicit rule, the AI will rationalize whatever is most convenient. "The user seems to want speed, so I'll skip the security check." Skills close this gap by making the expected behavior explicit.
  • Compounding errors. A missed skill in session 1 produces code that session 2 builds on top of. By session 5, the architectural debt is load-bearing and expensive to fix.

Write skills the same way you write tests: identify the failure first, then write the fix. Never write a skill because "it seems like a good idea." Write it because you have evidence of a specific failure that the skill will prevent.

Read the full file on GitHub · 369 lines

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. 10d ago First seen · 369 lines · 56 tokens per session scan A 23f37d2d0097

Subscribe to this mod's changes

writing-skills is a skill published in the GitHub repository Vimalk0703/shipworthy (7 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 56 tokens to every session and 4,957 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 2026-08-31.

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