name: skill-creator description: "Guide for creating effective skills that extend agent capabilities with specialized knowledge, workflows, or tool integrations. Use this skill when the user asks to: create a skill, make a skill, build a skill, set up a skill, initialize a skill, scaffold a skill, update or modify an existing skill, validate a skill, learn about skill structure, understand how skills work, or get guidance on skill design patterns."

Skill Creator

This skill provides guidance for creating effective skills.

About Skills

Skills are modular, self-contained packages that extend agent capabilities by providing specialized knowledge, workflows, and tools. Think of them as "onboarding guides" for specific domains or tasks—they transform a general-purpose agent into a specialized agent equipped with procedural knowledge and domain expertise.

Skill Location for Deepagents

In deepagents CLI, skills are stored in ~/.deepagents/<agent>/skills/ where <agent> is your agent configuration name (default is agent). For example, with the default configuration, skills live at:

~/.deepagents/agent/skills/
├── skill-name-1/
│   └── SKILL.md
├── skill-name-2/
│   └── SKILL.md
└── ...

What Skills Provide

1. Specialized workflows - Multi-step procedures for specific domains
2. Tool integrations - Instructions for working with specific file formats or APIs
3. Domain expertise - Company-specific knowledge, schemas, business logic
4. 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 the agent needs: system prompt, conversation history, other Skills' metadata, and the actual user request.

Default assumption: The agent is already very capable. Only add context the agent doesn't already have.

Anatomy of a Skill

Every skill consists of a required SKILL.md file and optional bundled resources:

skill-name/
├── SKILL.md (required)
│   ├── YAML frontmatter metadata (required)
│   │   ├── name: (required)
│   │   └── description: (required)
│   └── Markdown instructions (required)
└── Bundled Resources (optional)
    ├── scripts/          - Executable code (TypeScript/JavaScript/etc.)
    ├── references/       - Documentation intended to be loaded into context as needed
    └── assets/           - Files used in output (templates, icons, fonts, etc.)

Skill Creation Process

Skill creation involves these steps:

1. Understand the skill with concrete examples
2. Plan reusable skill contents (scripts, references, assets)
3. Initialize the skill (run init_skill.ts)
4. Edit the skill (implement resources and write SKILL.md)
5. Validate the skill (run quick_validate.ts)
6. Iterate based on real usage

Step 3: Initializing the Skill

When creating a new skill from scratch, run the init_skill.ts script:

npx tsx scripts/init_skill.ts <skill-name> --path <output-directory>

For deepagents, use the agent's skills directory:

npx tsx scripts/init_skill.ts <skill-name> --path ~/.deepagents/agent/skills

Step 5: Validate the Skill

Once development of the skill is complete, validate it:

npx tsx scripts/quick_validate.ts <path/to/skill-folder>

The validation script checks:

• YAML frontmatter format and required fields
• Skill naming conventions (hyphen-case, max 64 characters)
• Description completeness (max 1024 characters)
• Required fields: name and description