Creating Effective Skills

Guide for creating agent skills that follow Claude's official best practices.

Core Principles

Concise is Key: The context window is shared. Only add what Claude doesn't already know. Default assumption: Claude is already very smart.

Progressive Disclosure: Skills load in three levels:

1. Metadata (~100 tokens) - always loaded
2. SKILL.md body (<5k tokens) - when triggered
3. Bundled resources - as needed

Keep SKILL.md small: Target ~200 lines, maximum 500 lines. Move detailed content to reference files aggressively.

Single Responsibility: Each skill does one thing well.

Workflow