Authoring Skills

Guides creation of effective Claude skills with proper structure, naming, and progressive disclosure. Use when creating new skills, improving existing SKILL.md files, reviewing skill quality, or when the user mentions writing skills, skill authoring, or SKILL.md.

11 stars 3 forksSkill & Plugin Authoring

Install

skills CLI (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and more)

npx skills add andrueandersoncs/claude-skill-authoring-skill --skill authoring-skills

Manual install

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/andrueandersoncs/claude-skill-authoring-skill.git /tmp/claude-skill-authoring-skill
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
cp -r /tmp/claude-skill-authoring-skill/. ~/.claude/skills/authoring-skills

Personal skills live in ~/.claude/skills. Use .claude/skills in a project folder to share a skill with your team.

From the SKILL.md

# Skill Authoring

Create skills that Claude can discover and use effectively.

## Core Principles

### Conciseness is critical

The context window is shared. Only add what Claude doesn't already know.

Challenge each piece of content:
- "Does Claude really need this explanation?"
- "Can I assume Claude knows this?"
- "Does this justify its token cost?"

**Good** (~50 tokens):
```markdown
## Extract PDF text
Use pdfplumber:
\`\`\`python
import pdfplumber
with pdfplumber.open("file.pdf") as pdf:
    text = pdf.pages[0].extract_text()
\`\`\`
```

**Bad** (~150 tokens): Explaining what PDFs are and why pdfplumber is recommended.

### Degrees of freedom

Match specificity to task fragility:

| Freedom | When to use | Example |
|---------|-------------|---------|
| **High** (text instructions) | Multiple valid approaches, context-dependent | Code review guidelines |
| **Medium** (pseudocode/parameters) | Preferred pattern exists, some variation OK | Report templates |
| **Low** (exact scripts) | Fragile operations, consistency critical | Database migrations |

### Test with target models

- **Haiku**: Does the skill provide enough guidance?
- **Sonnet**: Is it clear and efficient?
- **Opus**: Does it avoid over-explaining?

## Skill Structure

### Frontmatter requirements

```yaml
---
name: processing-pdfs
description: Extracts text and tables from PDF files. Use when working with PDFs or document extraction.
---
```

**name** (required):
- Max 64 characters

Read the full skill on GitHub

Details

Skill name: authoring-skills
Repository: andrueandersoncs/claude-skill-authoring-skill
Repo updated: 7 January 2026

FAQ

What does the Authoring Skills skill do?

How do I install the Authoring Skills skill?

skills CLI (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and more): npx skills add andrueandersoncs/claude-skill-authoring-skill --skill authoring-skills. Skills go in ~/.claude/skills (personal) or .claude/skills (project), and Claude loads them automatically when a task matches the description.

Is Authoring Skills popular?

It lives in andrueandersoncs/claude-skill-authoring-skill, which has 11 GitHub stars and 3 forks.

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