skill-authoring
AI Agent Skills Best Practices
Design and development guide for AI agent skills, including Claude Code skills and MCP tools. Contains 46 rules across 8 categories, prioritized by impact to guide skill creation, review, and optimization.
When to Apply
- Creating new Claude Code skills or MCP tools
- Writing or reviewing SKILL.md metadata and descriptions
- Optimizing skill trigger reliability
- Structuring content for progressive disclosure
- Testing skill activation and behavior
- Designing tool interfaces for agent workflows
Core Principles
1. Descriptions drive activation. Claude selects skills based on description matching against user intent. Include specific capabilities, trigger keywords, and negative cases. A skill with a vague description activates inconsistently or never.
2. Front-load critical instructions. Claude may truncate long content. Place non-negotiable rules in the first 100 lines. Bury important constraints at the end and they get ignored.
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