Verified against Claude Code · 2026-07-28
Package a repeated procedure as a SKILL.md Claude Code discovers on its own
A skill-authoring prompt that produces a complete SKILL.md — trigger description, procedural body, and any bundled scripts or reference files — for a multi-step procedure the main agent should recognize and apply automatically, distinct from a slash command's explicit invocation and a subagent's isolated context.
The prompt
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Write a Claude Code skill as a SKILL.md file for .claude/skills/prompt-library-verification/SKILL.md, packaging a repeated procedure this agent should recognize and apply on its own when the right moment arises, without needing to be invoked by an explicit command name the way a slash command would be. PROCEDURE TO PACKAGE Whenever a new prompt-library category is drafted, verify every entry against the word-count and variable-consistency rules before considering the file done. WHEN THIS SKILL SHOULD ACTUALLY TRIGGER Any time a lib/prompts/<category>/prompts.ts file has just been written or edited and is about to be reported as complete. RESOURCES THIS SKILL SHOULD BUNDLE A small Node script, check-prompt-file.js, that programmatically verifies word counts and flags any entry missing a required field. OVERLAP WITH ANYTHING ALREADY DEFINED No existing skill currently covers prompt-library file verification specifically. STRUCTURE THE FILE AS 1. Frontmatter with a name and a description written as a precise trigger condition — the exact situation that should cause this skill to be recognized as relevant, not a vague summary of the topic area, since this description is the literal signal the main agent matches against when deciding whether the current moment calls for this procedure. 2. A body written as a direct, ordered procedure: the steps this task actually involves, in the order they need to happen, referencing any bundled resource by its relative path rather than assuming its content is already known. 3. If A small Node script, check-prompt-file.js, that programmatically verifies word counts and flags any entry missing a required field. names a script, template, or reference document this procedure depends on, describe what it is for and when to actually use it versus when the procedure can proceed without it — a bundled resource nobody is told when to reach for sits unused regardless of how useful it might be. CONSTRAINTS - Write the trigger description narrowly enough that this skill would not be mistakenly recognized as relevant to a superficially similar but actually different situation, and broadly enough that it would not fail to trigger on the actual situation it is meant for stated in slightly different words — the same precision problem a subagent's description field has, applied here to procedural knowledge instead of delegation. - If No existing skill currently covers prompt-library file verification specifically. names a skill this one is close to in scope, state the overlap explicitly and propose either merging the two or drawing a sharper line between them, rather than leaving two skills whose descriptions could both plausibly match the same moment. - Do not write this as a reference document explaining background concepts; write it as a procedure to execute. A skill that only explains what something is, without saying what to actually do, has not earned a spot as something the agent reaches for mid-task. - Keep the core file itself scoped to the procedure and its trigger; put any content genuinely too long to read every time it triggers into a separate bundled file the procedure references only when that specific step is reached, rather than loading everything up front regardless of which step is actually needed. OUTPUT The complete SKILL.md file, followed by one sentence naming what task this skill explicitly does not cover, so its boundary is stated rather than left to be discovered the first time it is invoked on something outside its actual scope.
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Why this works
A SKILL.md and a slash command solve genuinely different invocation problems, and conflating them produces a file that fits neither well — a slash command requires someone to remember its exact name and type it, which works for a workflow a person consciously decides to run, while a skill is meant to be recognized automatically by the main agent matching the current moment against the skill's own description, which is the right mechanism for a procedure that should apply whenever a certain situation arises regardless of whether anyone remembered to invoke anything by name. This is exactly why the description field carries the same load-bearing precision problem a subagent's description does, just one level removed from delegation and applied to procedural knowledge instead — a description vague enough to read as generally on-topic will get matched to situations it was not actually written for, while one too narrowly worded in the specific phrasing of the original use case will fail to trigger the next time the same underlying situation shows up described slightly differently, and both failure modes are invisible until the moment they actually happen. Requiring the body to read as an executable procedure rather than a reference explainer targets a common authoring mistake: it is much easier to write a paragraph explaining what a concept is than to write the exact ordered steps that constitute doing it, but only the second one is actually useful the moment this skill triggers mid-task, since the agent at that point needs to act, not to learn background. Deferring bundled content to separate files the procedure references only when a specific step needs it, rather than inlining everything into the core SKILL.md, matters because a skill that triggers is read in full every time it does, and a skill bloated with content only relevant to a rarely-reached step pays that reading cost on every single trigger regardless of whether that step is ever actually reached in a given invocation. Flagging overlap with an existing skill explicitly, instead of leaving two similarly-scoped skills both live at once, matters for the same reason overlapping subagent descriptions matter — an ambiguous match between two skills does not produce an error, it produces one of them getting silently applied while the other, equally plausible one, gets silently skipped, with no visible signal that a coin got flipped.
Verified against
Claude Code Sonnet 4.6 · 2026-07-28
Changelog
- 2026-07-28 — Initial publish, verified against Claude Code custom skills (Sonnet 4.6).
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