Skill Frontmatter Best Practices

Skill frontmatter is the YAML header that tells Claude when to invoke a skill. The name field identifies the skill. The description field determines whether the skill gets triggered. A bad description means the skill never fires when it should, or fires when it shouldn't.

The principle: the description is a matching function, not a marketing pitch. Its only job is to help Claude decide "should I use this skill for this user request?" Write it for precision matching, not for humans to read.

Frontmatter Structure

Required fields

---
name: cold-outbound-email-writing
description: This skill should be used when the user asks to "write cold outbound", "draft a cold email sequence", "write a sales sequence", "write outbound copy", "build a Lemlist sequence", "build an Outreach sequence", "write B2B cold emails", "draft a 3-email sequence", or any variation of writing outbound email copy for a B2B SaaS audience.
version: 0.1.0
---