skill-writer_skill

Overview

This skill guides you through creating well-structured Agent Skills for Claude Code, focusing on scope, location, frontmatter, content structure, and validation. It helps you design, write, test, and debug Skills so they reliably activate and behave as expected. Use it when you need hands-on guidance to author or improve a Skill.

How this skill works

I ask clarifying questions to define a single capability and recommend a precise name and location (personal vs project). I generate the required frontmatter, clear instructions, examples, and optional supporting files, then provide a validation checklist and debugging steps. Finally, I give testing steps and suggestions to refine triggers so the Skill activates correctly.

When to use it

• Creating a new Agent Skill from scratch
• Converting prompts or workflows into a reusable Skill
• Improving discovery by refining the frontmatter and description
• Troubleshooting a Skill that doesn’t activate or behaves incorrectly
• Designing project-shared Skills versus personal experimental ones

Best practices

• One Skill, one focused capability — avoid mega-Skills
• Use a concise, trigger-rich description that states what and when to use it
• Name the Skill with lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens only
• Provide step-by-step instructions and concrete examples, not vague guidance
• Put advanced details in separate reference or examples files for progressive disclosure

Example use cases

• Author a PDF extraction Skill that triggers on phrases like “extract text from PDF” and lists .pdf in the description
• Create a project-level data-processor Skill with helper scripts and usage examples
• Convert a manual workflow into a Skill that runs a validation script and returns results
• Refine a code-review Skill to be read-only by restricting allowed tools
• Troubleshoot activation by iterating on trigger words and testing with relevant queries