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Skill · Anthropic

skill-creator.

The meta skill. Use it once, then never write another SKILL.md scaffold by hand. Worth installing before you write your first skill.

$ /plugin install skill-creator@anthropic-agent-skills

Writing a skill is mostly mechanical work, the kind that follows the same shape every time. Frontmatter, sections, examples, templates. skill-creator is the skill that writes that scaffold for you, then helps you fill it in. It is the most-used skill on a working developer's machine that does not show up in any "top skills" list, because it works invisibly; you only notice when you stop using it and start writing scaffolds by hand again.

If you are going to build more than one skill, install this first. The two-minute investment of running it once teaches the conventions faster than reading the docs would, because the conventions show up in the file the skill produces rather than in a separate document you have to remember to consult.

§01What it produces

Running skill-creator generates a small but complete scaffold. The SKILL.md file with proper frontmatter, including name, description, and license. A templates directory for any boilerplate the skill needs. Example invocations that show the model how the skill should be called, which is the part most hand-written scaffolds skip. And a license file, usually MIT or Apache, configurable at creation time.

§02When you would reach for it

Anytime you find yourself prompting Claude with the same long context twice, you have a skill candidate. The threshold is low: even a tiny skill of ten lines of instructions and no templates saves you from re-typing those instructions in every session, and the savings compound the more often the skill runs.

§03Setup & usage

# install
/plugin install skill-creator@anthropic-agent-skills

# in your skills directory:
/skill skill-creator "describe the skill you want to build"

# it produces:
#   skills/your-skill/
#     SKILL.md
#     templates/
#     LICENSE.txt

§04Caveats

  • It writes the scaffold, but the brain is still on you. The skill-creator nails the structure, but the actual instructions inside SKILL.md are the work that does not get automated.
  • The defaults are opinionated. A non-standard layout means overriding more than keeping, and at some point it is faster to start from a stripped-down template.
  • Read what it generates. Skills run inside the agent's context, which makes them code, not config. The same review discipline applies.