skill-designer-agent-skills

# Skill Creator

This skill provides guidance for creating effective skills.

## About Skills

Skills are modular, self-contained packages that extend Claude's capabilities by providing
specialized knowledge, workflows, and tools. Think of them as "onboarding guides" for specific
domains or tasks—they transform Claude from a general-purpose agent into a specialized agent
equipped with procedural knowledge that no model can fully possess.

### 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 and repetitive tasks

## Core Principles

### Concise is Key

The context window is a public good. Skills share the context window with everything else Claude needs: system prompt, conversation history, other Skills' metadata, and the actual user request.

**Default assumption: Claude is already very smart.** Only add context Claude doesn't already have. Challenge each piece of information: "Does Claude really need this explanation?" and "Does this paragraph justify its token cost?"

Prefer concise examples over verbose explanations.

### Set Appropriate Degrees of Freedom

Match the level of specificity to the task's fragility and variability:

**High freedom (text-based instructions)**: Use when multiple approaches are valid, decisions depend on context, or heuristics guide the approach.

**Medium freedom (pseudocode or scripts with parameters)**: Use when a preferred pattern exists, some variation is acceptable, or configuration affects behavior.

**Low freedom (specific scripts, few parameters)**: Use when operations are fragile and error-prone, consistency is critical, or a specific sequence must be followed.

Think of Claude as exploring a path: a narrow bridge with cliffs needs specific guardrails (low freedom),...

# Skill Designer Agent Skills

A comprehensive skill for creating effective [Agent Skills](https://agentskills.io/) - includes validation, initialization, and packaging tools that comply with the official Agent Skills specification.

## Features

- **`init_skill.py`**: Initialize new skills from a template with proper structure
- **`quick_validate.py`**: Validate skills against the official Agent Skills specification
- **`package_skill.py`**: Package skills into distributable `.skill` files

## Quick Start

### Creating a New Skill

```bash
python scripts/init_skill.py my-new-skill --path ./skills
```

### Validating a Skill

```bash
python scripts/quick_validate.py path/to/skill-folder
```

### Packaging a Skill

```bash
python scripts/package_skill.py path/to/skill-folder
```

## Requirements

- Python 3.11+
- PyYAML (`pip install pyyaml`)

## Creating Releases

This repository uses GitHub Actions to automatically create releases when you push a version tag.

### Automatic Release on Tag Push

1. Create and push a version tag:
   ```bash
   git tag -a v1.0.0 -m "Initial release"
   git push origin v1.0.0
   ```

2. GitHub Actions will automatically:
   - Validate the skill
   - Package it into a `.skill` file
   - Create a GitHub release with the packaged file attached

### Manual Release

You can also trigger a release manually from the GitHub Actions tab:
1. Go to **Actions** → **Create Release**
2. Click **Run workflow**
3. The workflow will create a release with a timestamp-based version

## License

Apache License 2.0 - See [LICENSE.txt](LICENSE.txt) for details.