Use skill-author

Write a new portable Agent Skill (a SKILL.md folder) from a described task, for Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, Cursor, Kiro or Antigravity in any repo

Write a new portable Agent Skill (a SKILL.md folder) from a described task, for Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, Cursor, Kiro or Antigravity in any repo — a description that leads with the artifact and ends with trigger phrases, decisive steps, a quality bar, when and when-not sections naming near-miss siblings, anti-patterns, a non-interactive rule, reference files and scripts that work in every tool, acceptance evals and trigger queries, and the install path for each tool.

Reach for it when the user says "turn this into a skill", "write a SKILL.md for…", "make an agent skill that…", or wants a repeatable task packaged so their coding agent does it the same way every time.

Install it

npx skilldrop-cli install skill-author                 # Claude Code, your user folder
npx skilldrop-cli install skill-author --project       # Claude Code, this repo
npx skilldrop-cli install skill-author --ide cursor    # or kiro, codex, antigravity, copilot

It is part of the Skill engineering pack: --pack skill-engineering installs it with its neighbours.

Ask for it

Say it the way you would to a colleague. Requests like these route to it:

• "Turn this prompt I keep pasting into a reusable skill for Claude Code"
• "Write a SKILL.md that makes our agent draft API changelogs the same way every time"
• "Make an agent skill that converts our Jira export into a sprint summary, it has to work in Copilot and Cursor"
• "Help me package our code-review checklist as a skill for Codex"

Requests like these belong to a different skill, so it shouldn't answer them:

• "Add a new skill to the skilldrop catalogue with its manifest and catalogue row"
• "Review my existing skill folder and tell me if it's ready to publish"
• "Generate eval cases for the SKILL.md I already have"

If another skill answers instead, ask for this one by name: "use skill-author".

Check what you get

A good result:

• The description leads with the artifact and ends with trigger phrases a user would actually type, and is under 1,024 characters.
• Name equals folder name, kebab-case, at most 64 characters.
• Every near-miss sibling the user named appears twice: in a When NOT line and in a should-not-trigger query.
• Steps decide. No "consider", "you might", or "depending on preference"; at most two clarifying questions.
• A quality bar and anti-patterns are present, and the evals' assertions restate the quality bar as checkable claims.
• Portable: every script appears in both the ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR} form and the plain relative form; no absolute paths; no tool-only syntax without saying what other tools do.
• Nothing is invented. Install paths come from the reference table, and example outputs come from real runs.

See a worked example

• release notes skill

Use something else when

• Adding a skill to the skilldrop catalogue itself, with its manifest, pack and validate.py rules: follow that repo's AGENTS.md and run python3 validate.py
• Auditing a skill that already exists: use skill-review
• Adding evals to an existing skill without changing it: use eval-harness-generator
• Repo-wide always-on rules for agents (commands, conventions, forbidden actions): use agents-md-generator

Next

• SKILL.md, the instructions the agent reads
• Its page on the site
• Related: agents-md-generator, eval-harness-generator, skill-review

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