By name: creating-agent-skill description: 'Create and review Agent Skills that follow the open Agent Skills specification and best practices. Use when a user asks to create a new skill, build skill instructions, generate a SKILL.md file, review an existing skill for compliance, or improve skill quality. Covers skill structure, naming conventions, progressive disclosure, writing effective descriptions, creating actions and standards, and validation.' license: MIT allowed-tools: Bash
Creating Agent Skills
Overview
This skill provides capabilities for creating and reviewing Agent Skills that comply with the Agent Skills specification and follow authoring best practices.
Agent Skills are a lightweight, open format for extending AI agent capabilities with specialized knowledge and workflows. A skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md file with metadata and instructions, optionally bundled with scripts, references, and assets.
Capabilities
| Capability | Action | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Create | actions/create.md |
Generate a new, specification-compliant Agent Skill |
| Review | actions/review.md |
Analyse an existing skill for compliance and improvements |
Standards
This skill bundles the following standards in standards/:
| Standard | File | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Specification | specification.md |
Core Agent Skills format specification |
| Naming | naming.md |
Naming conventions for skills and files |
| Descriptions | descriptions.md |
Writing effective skill descriptions |
| Structure | structure.md |
Directory structure and progressive disclosure |
| Instructions | instructions.md |
Writing effective skill instructions |
| Clarifying Questions | clarifying-questions.md |
Questioning framework for gathering skill requirements |
| Checklist | checklist.md |
Consolidated compliance and quality checklist |
Principles
1. Concise is Key
The context window is a shared resource. Only add context the agent doesn't already have. Challenge each piece of information: "Does the agent really need this explanation?"
2. Progressive Disclosure
Structure skills for efficient context use:
- Metadata (~100 tokens):
nameanddescriptionloaded at startup - Instructions (<5000 tokens recommended): Full
SKILL.mdbody loaded when activated - Resources (as needed): Additional files loaded only when required
3. Set Appropriate Degrees of Freedom
Match specificity to task fragility:
- High freedom: Text-based instructions for flexible tasks
- Medium freedom: Pseudocode or parameterised scripts
- Low freedom: Exact scripts for fragile, error-prone operations
4. Test with Real Usage
Build evaluations before extensive documentation. Test with representative tasks. Iterate based on observed agent behavior, not assumptions.
Usage
- Load this skill manifest
- Identify the required capability (create or review)
- Load the bundled standards from
standards/ - Execute the action following
actions/<capability>.md