Agent skill · neolabhq
apply-anthropic-skill-best-practices
Comprehensive guide for skill development based on Anthropic's official best practices - use for complex skills requiring detailed structure
What it needs
About 10k tokens when loaded.
What this skill does
Anthropic's official skill authoring best practices Apply Anthropic's official skill authoring best practices to your skill. Good Skills are concise, well-structured, and tested with real usage. This guide provides practical authoring decisions to help you write Skills that Claude can discover and use effectively. Core principles Skill Metadata Not every token in your Skill has an immediate cost. At startup, only the metadata (name and description) from all Skills is pre-loaded. Claude reads SKILL.md only when the Skill becomes relevant, and reads additional files only as needed. However, being concise in SKILL.md still matters: once Claude loads it, every token competes with conversation history and other context. Test with all models you plan to use Skills act as additions to models, so effectiveness depends on the underlying model. Test your Skill with all the models you plan to use it with. Testing considerations by model: Claude Haiku (fast, economical): Does the Skill provide enough guidance? Claude Sonnet (balanced): Is the Skill clear and efficient? Claude Opus (powerful reasoning): Does the Skill avoid over-explaining? What works perfectly for Opus might need more detail for Haiku. If you plan to use your Skill across multiple models, aim for instructions that work well with all of them. Skill structure <Note> YAML Frontmatter: The SKILL.md frontmatter supports two fields: name - Human-readable name of the Skill (64 characters maximum) description - One-line description of what the Skill does and when to use it (1024 characters maximum) For complete Skill structure details, see the Skills overview. </Note> Naming conventions Use consistent naming patterns to make Skills easier to reference and discuss. We recommend using gerund form (verb + -ing) for Skill names, as this clearly describes the activity or capability the Skill provides. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills neolabhq/apply-anthropic-skill-best-practices--2a372b