skill-creator
Guide for creating effective skills. This skill should be used when users want to create a new skill (or update an existing skill) that extends Claude's capabilities with specialized knowledge, workflows, or tool integrations.
When & Why to Use This Skill
The Skill Creator is a comprehensive framework designed to streamline the development and optimization of custom Claude skills. It enables users to extend Claude's core capabilities by integrating specialized knowledge, complex workflows, and external tools through a standardized, modular structure. By emphasizing concise prompting and efficient context management, this skill ensures that custom AI agents remain performant and highly effective for specific domain tasks.
Use Cases
- Developing new Claude skills from scratch using standardized templates and initialization scripts to ensure architectural consistency.
- Optimizing existing AI workflows by refactoring long instructions into modular reference files to maximize context window efficiency.
- Integrating deterministic scripts into Claude's environment to handle fragile or repetitive operations that require high precision.
- Establishing a unified skill development lifecycle for teams to facilitate better maintenance and scaling of AI agent capabilities.
| name | skill-creator |
|---|---|
| description | Guide for creating effective skills. This skill should be used when users want to create a new skill (or update an existing skill) that extends Claude's capabilities with specialized knowledge, workflows, or tool integrations. |
Skill Creator
Core Principles
- Concise is key: Context window is shared. Only add what Claude doesn't already know.
- Keep skills short: SKILL.md under 100 lines preferred, 500 lines max. Split to references/ if longer.
- Degrees of freedom: Match specificity to task fragility. Scripts for fragile operations, text for flexible ones.
Skill Structure
skill-name/
├── SKILL.md (required)
│ ├── YAML frontmatter: name, description (required)
│ └── Markdown body (required)
└── Bundled Resources (optional)
├── scripts/ - Executable code for deterministic/repeated tasks
├── references/ - Documentation loaded as needed
└── assets/ - Files used in output (templates, images)
SKILL.md
- Frontmatter:
nameanddescriptiononly. Description is the trigger mechanism—include when to use. - Body: Instructions for using the skill and its bundled resources.
Resources
- scripts/: Reusable code. Test before including.
- references/: Domain knowledge, schemas, detailed guides. Load only when needed.
- assets/: Templates, images for output. Not loaded into context.
Do NOT include: README.md, CHANGELOG.md, or auxiliary documentation.
Creation Process
- Understand - Gather concrete usage examples from user
- Plan - Identify reusable scripts, references, assets
- Initialize - Run
scripts/init_skill.py <name> --path <dir> - Edit - Implement resources, write SKILL.md
- Iterate - Improve based on real usage
Design Patterns
See references/ for detailed patterns:
- references/workflows.md - Multi-step processes, conditional logic
- references/output-patterns.md - Templates, quality standards
init_skill.py
scripts/init_skill.py <skill-name> --path <output-directory>
Creates skill directory with SKILL.md template and example resources.
Note: In this repo, create skills in modules/home/profile-dev/programs/claude-code/skills/.