Skill Creation Guide

If you're building skills for Claude, this is your reference manual. It walks through the entire anatomy of a skill file: what goes in SKILL.md, when to bundle scripts versus references versus assets, and how to design for progressive disclosure so you're not wasting tokens. The core insight is treating the context window like a shared resource and only loading what's needed when it's needed. Especially useful is the guidance on degrees of freedom, which helps you calibrate whether to give Claude loose instructions or lock things down with specific scripts. Written for people who are past the "what is a skill" phase and need practical patterns for structuring them well.

skills.sh installs: 514
GitHub stars: 33.2K
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add davila7/claude-code-templates --skill skill-creation-guide --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

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

Specialized workflows - Multi-step procedures for specific domains
Tool integrations - Instructions for working with specific file formats or APIs
Domain expertise - Company-specific knowledge, schemas, business logic
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.

SKILL.md on GitHub