best-skills is a collection of reusable skills for coding agents, including tools for writing papers, creating diagrams and presentations, generating code documentation, and other tasks. Users install its skills into agents such as Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or OpenClaw so those agents can recognize relevant requests and run the corresponding workflows. The catalogue entries are examples of the skills included in the collection.
Getting it into your agent
It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/xstongxue/best-skillsnpx agentmods add skills/xstongxue/best-skills/skill-createWrote 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/xstongxue/best-skills/skill-create)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/xstongxue/best-skills/skill-create"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/xstongxue/best-skills/skill-create/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/xstongxue/best-skills/skill-create"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/xstongxue/best-skills/skill-create.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector warn
SkillSpector: 2 findings, up to medium
These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →
- medium Rogue Agent · line 22 Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
- medium Rogue Agent · line 61 Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
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 | $0.00046 | $0.03168 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00023 | $0.01584 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00009 | $0.00634 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00317 |
Grade A, and why
create-skill 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.
Copies of this mod
5 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:
- create-skill — 100% identical, 32 lines differ
- create-skill — 94% identical, 38 lines differ
- create-skill — 94% identical, 38 lines differ
- create-skill — 94% identical, 38 lines differ
- create-skill — 94% identical, 38 lines differ
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 495 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Creating Skills in Cursor
This skill guides you through creating effective Agent Skills for Cursor. Skills are markdown files that teach the agent how to perform specific tasks: reviewing PRs using team standards, generating commit messages in a preferred format, querying database schemas, or any specialized workflow.
Before You Begin: Gather Requirements
Before creating a skill, gather essential information from the user about:
- Purpose and scope: What specific task or workflow should this skill help with?
- Target location: Should this be a personal skill (~/.cursor/skills/) or project skill (.cursor/skills/)?
- Trigger scenarios: When should the agent automatically apply this skill?
- Key domain knowledge: What specialized information does the agent need that it wouldn't already know?
- Output format preferences: Are there specific templates, formats, or styles required?
- Existing patterns: Are there existing examples or conventions to follow?
Inferring from Context
If you have previous conversation context, infer the skill from what was discussed. You can create skills based on workflows, patterns, or domain knowledge that emerged in the conversation.
Gathering Additional Information
If you need clarification, use the AskQuestion tool when available:
Example AskQuestion usage:
- "Where should this skill be stored?" with options like ["Personal (~/.cursor/skills/)", "Project (.cursor/skills/)"]
- "Should this skill include executable scripts?" with options like ["Yes", "No"]
If the AskQuestion tool is not available, ask these questions conversationally.
Skill File Structure
Directory Layout
Skills are stored as directories containing a SKILL.md file:
skill-name/
├── SKILL.md # Required - main instructions
├── reference.md # Optional - detailed documentation
├── examples.md # Optional - usage examples
└── scripts/ # Optional - utility scripts
├── validate.py
└── helper.sh
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.
- 13d ago First seen · 495 lines · 46 tokens per session scan A 68c8f86e729a
create-skill is a skill published in the GitHub repository xstongxue/best-skills (2,814 stars, last pushed 18d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 46 tokens to every session and 3,168 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.
Other skills, from other repositories
skill-creator
Create new skills, modify and improve existing skills, and measure skill performance. Use when users want to create a skill from scratch, edit, or optimize an existing skill, run evals to test a skill, benchmark skill performance with variance analysis, or optimize a skill's description for better triggering accuracy.
gh-pr-review
Automated Cherry Studio review for local branches, PRs, commits, files, architecture docs, and repository skills. Use for code or documentation reviews that need project-specific naming, main/renderer/shared placement and dependency rules, IpcApi and DataApi boundaries, lifecycle/service ownership, renderer hooks…
prepare-release
Prepare a new release by collecting commits, generating bilingual release notes, updating version files, and creating a release branch. Use when asked to prepare/create a release, bump version, or run /prepare-release.
claude-automation-recommender
Analyze a codebase and recommend Claude Code automations (hooks, subagents, skills, plugins, MCP servers). Use when user asks for automation recommendations, wants to optimize their Claude Code setup, mentions improving Claude Code workflows, asks how to first set up Claude Code for a project, or wants to know what…
gh-create-issue
Use when user wants to create a GitHub issue for the current repository. Must read and follow the repository's issue template format.
gh-create-pr
Create or update GitHub pull requests using the repository-required workflow and template compliance. Use when asked to create/open/update a PR so the assistant reads .github/pullrequesttemplate.md, fills every template section, preserves markdown structure exactly, and marks missing data as N/A or None instead of…