skill-writing-best-practices

Included with Lifetime

$97 forever

Guidelines for creating AI agent skills. Use when writing new skills, documenting coding patterns, or reviewing skill files. Triggers when creating or modifying files in the skills/ directory.

AI Agents

What this skill does


# Skill Writing Best Practices

Patterns for creating effective AI agent skills that capture coding conventions and best practices. Contains 6 rules covering structure, content, and writing style.

## When to Apply

Reference these guidelines when:

- Creating a new skill from scratch
- Extracting patterns from an existing codebase
- Reviewing or improving existing skills
- Converting documentation into skill format

## Rules Summary

### Structure (HIGH)

#### skill-directory-structure - @rules/skill-directory-structure.md

Every skill has a SKILL.md and a rules/ directory.

```
skills/
└── topic-best-practices/
    ├── SKILL.md              # Main summary with all rules
    └── rules/
        ├── rule-name.md      # Detailed individual rules
        └── another-rule.md
```

#### skill-md-structure - @rules/skill-md-structure.md

SKILL.md has frontmatter, overview, and condensed rule summaries.

```markdown
---
name: topic-best-practices
description: When to use this skill.
---

# Topic Best Practices

Brief intro. Contains N rules across M categories.

## When to Apply

- Situation 1
- Situation 2

## Rules Summary

### Category (IMPACT)

#### rule-name - @rules/rule-name.md

One sentence. Code example.
```

#### rule-file-structure - @rules/rule-file-structure.md

Each rule file has frontmatter, explanation, examples, and takeaways.

```markdown
---
title: Rule Title
impact: HIGH
tags: [relevant, tags]
---

# Rule Title

What to do and why.

## Why

- Benefit 1
- Benefit 2

## Pattern

\`\`\`ruby
# Bad
bad_code

# Good
good_code
\`\`\`

## Rules

1. Takeaway 1
2. Takeaway 2
```

### Content (HIGH)

#### concrete-examples - @rules/concrete-examples.md

Every rule needs code examples. Abstract advice is hard to apply.

```markdown
# Bad: Too abstract
"Keep your code organized."

# Good: Concrete
"Place concerns in `app/models/model_name/` not `app/models/concerns/`."

\`\`\`ruby
# Shows exactly what to do
app/models/card/closeable.rb
\`\`\`
```

#### explain-why - @rules/explain-why.md

Don't just show what. Explain why it matters.

```markdown
## Why

- **Testability**: Sync method can be tested without job infrastructure
- **Flexibility**: Callers choose sync or async based on context
- **Clarity**: The `_later` suffix makes async behavior explicit
```

### Style (MEDIUM)

#### writing-style - @rules/writing-style.md

Write naturally. Avoid AI-isms and excessive formatting.

```markdown
# Bad
---
Here is an overview of the key points:
---

# Good
Group related rules by category. Each rule gets a one-sentence
description and a short code example.
```

## Philosophy

Good skills are:

1. **Concrete** - Every rule has code examples
2. **Reasoned** - Explains why, not just what
3. **Scannable** - Easy to find relevant rules quickly
4. **Honest** - Shows when NOT to use a pattern
5. **Natural** - Written like documentation, not AI output

Files: 7

Size: 23.9 KB

Complexity: 35/100

Category: AI Agents

Source: https://github.com/sergiodxa/agent-skills/tree/main/skills/skill-writing-best-practices

Related in AI Agents

skill-development

Included

Comprehensive meta-skill for creating, managing, validating, auditing, and distributing Claude Code skills and slash commands (unified in v2.1.3+). Provides skill templates, creation workflows, validation patterns, audit checklists, naming conventions, YAML frontmatter guidance, progressive disclosure examples, and best practices lookup. Use when creating new skills, validating existing skills, auditing skill quality, understanding skill architecture, needing skill templates, learning about YAML frontmatter requirements, progressive disclosure patterns, tool restrictions (allowed-tools), skill composition, skill naming conventions, troubleshooting skill activation issues, creating custom slash commands, configuring command frontmatter, using command arguments ($ARGUMENTS, $1, $2), bash execution in commands, file references in commands, command namespacing, plugin commands, MCP slash commands, Skill tool configuration, or deciding between skills vs slash commands. Delegates to docs-management skill for official documentation.

AI Agentsscripts

reprompter

Included

Transform messy prompts into well-structured, effective prompts — single or multi-agent. Use when: "reprompt", "reprompt this", "clean up this prompt", "structure my prompt", rough text needing XML tags and best practices, "reprompter teams", "repromptception", "run with quality", "smart run", "smart agents", multi-agent tasks, audits, parallel work, anything going to agent teams. Don't use when: simple Q&A, pure chat, immediate execution-only tasks. See "Don't Use When" section for details. Outputs: Structured XML/Markdown prompt, quality score (before/after), optional team brief + per-agent sub-prompts, agent team output files. Success criteria: Single mode quality score ≥ 7/10; Repromptception per-agent prompt quality score 8+/10; all required sections present, actionable and specific.

AI Agentsscripts

adaptive-compaction

Included

Adaptive add-on policy and recovery layer that decides WHEN to compact, prune, snapshot, or fork -- replacing fixed-percent auto-compaction across Claude Code, Codex, and MCP-capable hosts. Trigger on auto-compact timing or damage: "when should I compact", "is it safe to compact now or start a fresh session", "auto-compact fires too early/mid-task", "switching to an unrelated task but the window still has space", "context rot", "answers get worse the longer the session runs", "the agent forgot the plan or my decisions after it summarized", "add a layer on top that manages context without changing the agent", raising autoCompactWindow to give the policy room, or installing/tuning a cross-tool compaction policy or PreCompact hook -- even when "compaction" is never said but the problem is context-window pressure or post-summarization memory loss. Do NOT use to summarize a conversation, build RAG, write a summarization prompt (decides WHEN not HOW), or answer max-context-length trivia.

AI Agentsscripts

agent-skill-creator

Included

Create cross-platform agent skills from workflow descriptions. Activates when users ask to create an agent, automate a repetitive workflow, create a custom skill, or need advanced agent creation. Triggers on phrases like create agent for, automate workflow, create skill for, every day I have to, daily I need to, turn process into agent, need to automate, create a cross-platform skill, validate this skill, export this skill, migrate this skill. Supports single skills, multi-agent suites, transcript processing, template-based creation, interactive configuration, cross-platform export, and spec validation.

AI Agentsscripts

llm-wiki

Included

Use when building or maintaining a persistent personal knowledge base (second brain) in Obsidian where an LLM incrementally ingests sources, updates entity/concept pages, maintains cross-references, and keeps a synthesis current. Triggers include "second brain", "Obsidian wiki", "personal knowledge management", "ingest this paper/article/book", "build a research wiki", "compound knowledge", "Memex", or whenever the user wants knowledge to accumulate across sessions instead of being re-derived by RAG on every query.

AI Agentsscripts

skill-master

Included

Agent Skills authoring, evaluation, and optimization. Create, edit, validate, benchmark, and improve skills following the agentskills.io specification. Use when designing SKILL.md files, structuring skill folders (references, scripts, assets), ingesting external documentation into skills, running trigger evals, benchmarking skill quality, optimizing descriptions, or performing blind A/B comparisons. Keywords: agentskills.io, SKILL.md, skill authoring, eval, benchmark, trigger optimization.

AI Agentsscripts