Skill engineering pack reference
Every skill in the Skill engineering pack — what it makes, when to use it, what it needs, its quality bar, and what it hands off to.
For people writing Agent Skills in their own repos: write a portable SKILL.md folder from a described task, then audit any skill for routing, portability, safety, structure and evals before you share it.
| Install | npx skilldrop-cli install --pack skill-engineering |
| Skills | 2 plus 5 from core |
| Loops | none |
| How-to | Use the Skill engineering pack |
Skills
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 — 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.
Tier standard · v0.1.1 · SKILL.md · skill page
Use 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.
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.
Hands off to: skill-review when the skill folder is written.
Not for:
- Adding a skill to the skilldrop catalogue itself, with its manifest, pack and
validate.pyrules: follow that repo'sAGENTS.mdand runpython3 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
skill-review
Audit an existing Agent Skill folder (SKILL.md plus its scripts, references and evals) for Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, Cursor, Kiro or Antigravity, and return a READY / FIX FIRST / REWRITE verdict with severity-tagged findings across five areas — whether a router would pick it and whether it collides with a sibling, portability, safety (mapped to the OWASP Agentic Skills Top 10), structure, and eval coverage — backed by a stdlib lint script for the mechanical checks.
Tier heavy · v0.1.2 · SKILL.md · skill page
Use it when the user says "review this skill", "is my SKILL.md any good", "why doesn't my skill trigger", "is this skill safe to install", or wants a skill checked before sharing or publishing it.
Needs: Python 3 for its scripts (standard library only).
A good result:
- The verdict follows the rules in step 9, and the counts in the verdict line match the findings below it.
- Lint output is pasted verbatim, and every lint ERROR either appears as a finding or is explained away in one line.
- Every finding has a location and a concrete fix. "Improve the description" is not a fix. The rewritten sentence is.
- Collision findings name the sibling and the query that would route wrongly.
- Safety findings carry an AST ID and say what the line makes the agent do, not just which pattern matched.
- Judgment goes beyond the lint. At least one finding, or an explicit "nothing beyond the lint", covers what the regexes can't see: routing, paraphrased safety issues, steps that don't decide.
- It reviews the skill, not the task. Whether release notes should exist is out of scope. Whether this skill writes them reliably is the job.
Hands off to: skill-author when the verdict is REWRITE; eval-harness-generator when the only material gap is eval coverage.
Not for:
- Writing a new skill from a task description: use
skill-author - Adding a skill to the skilldrop catalogue itself, which has its own manifest and
validate.pyrules: follow that repo'sAGENTS.mdand runpython3 validate.py - Generating more eval cases for a skill whose only gap is coverage: use
eval-harness-generator - Reviewing a repo's always-on AGENTS.md policy file: use
agents-md-generator - Threat-modelling the agent deployment that runs skills (its tools, data and egress): use
agent-threat-model - Critiquing an ordinary document such as an ADR or design doc: use
doc-critique
Included from core
Installed with this pack. Details: Core pack reference.
brief-intake: Turn raw mess — a Slack thread, meeting transcript, Jira ticket, half-written Notion page, email chain, or paragraph of free-form context — into a structured brief that the downstream skill (adr-generator, design-doc, runbook-generator, exec-summary, slide-outliner) can consume without further intake.context-graph: Map the decisions behind a codebase from its ADRs, RFCs and design records — each record's status and date, what supersedes or amends what, which records cite which, the files and folders each decision governs, and with git the commits that implemented it and the commits that changed each decision's code since it was made, and who made them — then answer "why is it like this?" from the record and check the record is still true. Finds supersessions only one side records, current decisions pointing at code that is gone, code that has drifted from its decision, two current decisions governing the same path, and references to records that don't exist.council-review: Convene a council of distinct senior-engineer personas (Architect, Security, Operator/SRE, Pragmatist, User-Advocate, plus optional bench seats) to deliberate a decision, design, or code change — each takes an independent stance, the genuine disagreements are surfaced as named cruxes, and a Chair issues a reconciled verdict that records dissents and states what would change the decision. The "Claude Council."doc-critique: Review an existing document — ADR, design doc, runbook, exec summary, tech-comparison matrix, deck outline, decision log — and produce a structured critique against the same quality bars the skilldrop generators enforce. Categorizes findings by severity (blocker / major / minor / nit), points to the exact section/line, and suggests a concrete fix for each.output-hygiene: Review agent-written text before it ships and strip the machine artifacts it carries — invisible Unicode, non-breaking spaces, homoglyphs, harness-added provenance trailers, trailing chat closers — then flag the prose tells a script cannot catch, each quoted with a rewrite.