Skill engineering
- When to use it
- 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.
- Covers
- Build agent skills (2)
- Where you decide
- No gated loop of its own; the skills run one at a time.
- Size
- 7 skills · 0 loops
20–40 minutes a session
npx skilldrop-cli install --pack skill-engineering
Installs 7 skills, including core.
Other ways to install
The pack's loops too, each as an invokable skill:
npx skilldrop-cli install --loop --pack skill-engineering
In Claude Code, as a plugin (after /plugin marketplace add sananthanarayan/skilldrop):
/plugin install skill-engineering@skilldrop
Into Cursor, Kiro or another IDE:
npx skilldrop-cli install --pack skill-engineering --ide cursor
Start here: Turn a task you keep explaining into a skill, then review it
Paste this into your agent:
Make a skill that writes customer-facing release notes from the merged PRs I paste: grouped New / Improved / Fixed, breaking changes first, one line per PR with its number. We use Claude Code and Copilot, and we already have a launch-post skill for announcements. Then review the skill before I commit it.
- Before you start
- A task you repeat with your coding agent, and Python 3.9 or later for the lint script
- How to tell it worked
- skill-author writes a folder with SKILL.md, a template and evals, plus the install path for each of your tools, and skill-review returns a READY, FIX FIRST or REWRITE verdict with the lint script's output pasted in.
- If nothing happens
- If a skill does not activate, ask for it by name ("use skill-author"). If the lint script will not run, check that python3 is on your PATH; skill-review can walk the same checks by hand.
A typical session
When: You keep explaining the same task to your coding agent, or you are about to share or install a skill and want to know it will route, work in every tool, and do nothing unsafe. About 20–40 minutes.
You bring:
- the task: what it produces and what makes a good one
- three to five things you'd type to ask for it
- the skills already installed next to it, and which requests belong to them
- the tools your team uses: Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, Cursor, Kiro or Antigravity
-
- You
- Describe the task, the trigger phrases and the nearby skills, and answer one round of questions.
- You get
- A skill folder: SKILL.md with a routable description, steps, quality bar, boundaries and anti-patterns, plus a template, evals, and the install path for each tool.
-
- You
- Point it at the folder and at the folder that holds your other skills.
- You get
- The lint script's output and a verdict with severity-tagged findings on routing, portability, safety, structure and evals, each with a fix.
- You decide
- Commit the skill, apply the fixes and review again, or rewrite it around one artifact.
You end with: A reviewed skill that installs into each of your tools from one folder, with evals to rerun when you change it.
Compare Skill engineering with another pack
Skills in this pack (2)
- 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. Use 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. standard
- 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. Use 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. heavy
Included from core (5)
- 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. Use whenever the user has unstructured source material and is about to invoke another skilldrop skill, or when a draft is missing the load-bearing context the next step will need. standard
- 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. Use when the user asks "why do we use X", "which decisions govern this file or service", "is this ADR still current", "has the code drifted since we decided this", "are our ADRs out of date", "what was decided before I change this", wants a map of the architecture decisions, or is onboarding onto a codebase's history. standard
- 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." Use when a choice has real tradeoffs and one reviewer's voice isn't enough: architecture decisions, risky changes before merge, RFC/design scrutiny, "should we adopt X?", rewrite-vs-refactor, or a pre-mortem. heavy
- 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. Use when the user wants a second-pair-of-eyes review before sharing a doc, or has been handed someone else's artifact and wants to know what to push back on. heavy
- 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. Use when the user wants to clean up AI-generated output, asks to remove a Claude watermark, attribution footer, or "Generated with" line, wants a draft that does not read as machine-written, or needs a pre-ship hygiene pass on a document, commit message, or pasted chat answer. standard