Skill Crafter

Skill Crafter

A meta-skill for building and improving Claude Code skills the right way. It encodes a set of authoring best practices and demonstrates every one of them in its own structure, so it is also a worked example of a well-formed skill.

Version 0.1.4. Distributed as a Claude Code and Codex plugin; see Install.

What it does

• Create a new skill from a rough idea, through a gated PACT cycle (Prepare, Architect, Create, Test).
• Improve an existing skill: interview the user, assess it against the practices, apply the smallest fixes, and re-test.
• Validate any skill against the universal structural rules with one CLI.

You reason through the work; the scripts verify what is checkable. Every phase is gated on user feedback, so the build stays steerable.

The practices it encodes

1. SKILL.md is a slim router; detail lives in folders and loads on demand.
2. Modularize when a file grows past a router (SOLID/DRY, map dependencies).
3. Decompose into the standard folders: agents, scripts, templates, references, protocols.
4. Validate what is mechanical and stable with a script; for judgment, the model emits a label against a rubric and the script checks the label.
5. Scripts are CLI-first (Python, stdlib, argparse, exit codes).
6. Prompts follow Context, Mission, Instructions, Format, Guidelines.
7. Created skills are self-refining.
8. Mandatory behavior lives in the numbered workflow, not a side section.
9. Verify the packaged artifact, not just the source, and run it end to end.

The canonical statement lives in skills/skill-crafter/references/best-practices.md.

Structure

This repo is a plugin for both Claude Code and Codex. The skill is a self-contained unit under skills/skill-crafter/; the two manifests make it installable in each ecosystem (both point at the same skills/ directory). It is distributed through the Synaptic Labs marketplace (ProfSynapse/synaptic-labs-plugins), which pins this plugin to a release tag.

skill-crafter/                     repo root = plugin root
├── .claude-plugin/
│   └── plugin.json                Claude Code plugin manifest
├── .codex-plugin/
│   └── plugin.json                Codex plugin manifest (skills -> ./skills/)
├── skills/
│   └── skill-crafter/             the skill itself
│       ├── SKILL.md               slim router
│       ├── protocols/             create-skill, improve-skill, modularize, validate
│       ├── references/            best-practices, progressive-disclosure, folder-taxonomy,
│       │                          prompt-structure, validation-pattern
│       ├── agents/                skill-preparer, skill-architect, skill-creator,
│       │                          skill-tester, skill-improver
│       ├── scripts/               scaffold.py, validate_skill.py, verify_package.py
│       └── templates/             SKILL, agent, protocol, reference, script,
│                                  self-refine, refinement-log
└── README.md

Install

As a plugin (recommended)

Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add ProfSynapse/synaptic-labs-plugins
/plugin install skill-crafter@synaptic-labs

Codex:

codex plugin marketplace add ProfSynapse/synaptic-labs-plugins
# then open /plugins in a session to install + enable

The marketplace index lives on main of the marketplace repo, but its entry pins this plugin to a release tag (ref: v0.1.4), so installs always come from a tagged release, not from whatever is on main. Update with /plugin update (Claude) or codex plugin marketplace upgrade (Codex).

Manual (no plugin system)

Each release attaches a .skill archive. Unzip it so skill-crafter/ lands in your skills location:

unzip skill-crafter-0.1.3.skill -d ~/.claude/skills/

Usage

Inside Claude Code, invoke the skill and describe what you want:

• "Build a skill that ..." runs create-skill.
• "Improve this skill: ..." runs improve-skill.

Scripts (CLI)

Run from inside the skill directory (skills/skill-crafter/):

# Generate a new skill's structure from the templates
python scripts/scaffold.py my-skill --description "Do X when Y." --path ../skills

# Validate any skill directory against the universal rules
python scripts/validate_skill.py path/to/skill