skill-creator

Skill Creator

This skill provides guidance for creating effective skills using the existing tool system.

About Skills

Skills are modular, self-contained packages that extend the agent's capabilities by providing specialized knowledge, workflows, and tools. They transform a general-purpose agent into a specialized agent equipped with procedural knowledge.

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 tasks

Core Principle

Concise is Key: Only add context the agent doesn't already have. Challenge each piece of information: "Does this justify its token cost?" Prefer concise examples over verbose explanations.

Skill Structure

Every skill consists of a required SKILL.md file and optional bundled resources:

skill-name/
├── SKILL.md (required)
│   ├── YAML frontmatter metadata (required)
│   │   ├── name: (required)
│   │   └── description: (required)
│   └── Markdown instructions (required)
└── Bundled Resources (optional)
    ├── scripts/          - Executable code (Python/Bash/etc.)
    ├── references/       - Documentation intended to be loaded into context as needed
    └── assets/           - Files used in output (templates, icons, fonts, etc.)

SKILL.md Components

Frontmatter (YAML) - Required fields:

• name: Skill name in hyphen-case (e.g., weather-api, pdf-editor)
• description: CRITICAL - Primary triggering mechanism
  • Must clearly describe what the skill does
  • Must explicitly state when to use it
  • Include specific trigger scenarios and keywords
  • All "when to use" info goes here, NOT in body
  • Example: "PDF document processing with rotation, merging, splitting, and text extraction. Use when user needs to: (1) Rotate PDF pages, (2) Merge multiple PDFs, (3) Split PDF files, (4) Extract text from PDFs."